The Committee met at 9:00 a.m. in Room 5083.

MADAM CHAIR (Ms Jones): Good morning, everyone.

I think we are all here now so we will move to get started. I am going to start this morning by asking the committee members to introduce themselves by name and district. Then we will move to you, Minister, to introduce your officials.

Maybe we can start with you, Roland.

Just a reminder, whenever you speak you have to turn on the microphone and when you are finished could you please turn it off so we don't get feedback in the recording.

Thank you.

MR. BUTLER: Roland Butler, MHA for Port de Grave District.

MS M. HODDER: Mary Hodder, MHA for Burin-Placentia West.

MR. MERCER: Bob Mercer, MHA for Humber East.

MR. HEDDERSON: Tom Hedderson, MHA for Harbour Main-Whitbourne.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Ross Wiseman, MHA for Trinity North.

MADAM CHAIR: Yvonne Jones, MHA for Cartwright-L'Anse au Clair.

MR. PARSONS: Kelvin Parsons, Minister of Justice and Attorney General.

Perhaps the easiest way to do this, we have all the brains of the legal shop here. So we will start over here with Teresa and maybe everybody can introduce themselves and what your role is in the department.

MS HEFFERNAN: Teresa Heffernan, Financial Manager.

MR. LAKE: Calvin Lake, Senior Legislative Counsel.

MR. ALCOCK: Ralph Alcock, Assistant Deputy Minister of Public Protection & Support Services.

MR. CUMMINGS: John Cummings, Deputy Minister.

MR. CURRAN: Chris Curran, Assistant Deputy Minister of Civil Law and Related Services.

MR. MILLS: Tom Mills, Director of Public Prosecutions.

MR. McNUTT: Marvin McNutt, Director of Adult Corrections & Communication Services.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you all very much.

The first order of business this morning: Can I ask for a motion to move the minutes of the last meeting, please?

On motion, minutes adopted as circulated.

MADAM CHAIR: Before we start this morning I just want to remind all members and the department officials, that whenever you speak identify yourselves for the record, to ensure that each person is identified so that it can be recorded.

I will start off by calling the first head.

CLERK: 1.1.01

MADAM CHAIR: Now we will ask the minister to make some opening remarks and then we will start discussion of the heads.

MR. PARSONS: Thank you, Madam Chair.

(Inaudible) instances where increases are already built in as a result of collective agreements or annualized increases. In Justice, in particular, you will note that when it comes to provincial court judges, for example, there is already a tribunal decision that is in effect which has led to automatic increases. Any increases that are there come about usually as a result of already negotiated agreements or because of tribunal decisions. I would point out, there are some things - of course we are dealing with estimates here as opposed to finalized figures, for that very reason it is very difficult. You budget based on what you believe your expenses will be.

The Department of Justice, probably unlike any other department, has great difficulty deciding, at any given time, who is going to be suing government the next day. As Justice, of course, you represent any party that does sue government. We have no idea today if we are going to face, in the next year, one case or 1,000 cases. What amount we spend towards any particular case we do not know. So we do our best to estimate what it is and have funds available, but that varies from year to year, sometimes extremely.

Likewise, in terms of payouts on behalf of government, you may have a pot of money like we have in Justice - $2 million has been there, I believe, for a number of years as a pot to pay judgements on behalf of government because albeit, Justice does the defense on behalf of all departments. The actual cases may evolve anywhere in the government realm. It may be a case involving Works, Services on a contracting matter. It may come from the Department of Education if there was some dispute or there may have been a layoff and a wrongful dismissal claim in Environment, Forestry or wherever. You do not know in any given year exactly what the amount of judgements or settlements might be. So that pot can range extremely. Some years you use it all, other years you do not, most years you go over because you do not know the number of cases. That is why you will see some extreme fluctuations here between what was budgeted last year and what ended up being revised.

We will certainly be prepared to give you the details on each of those but I just want to lay that out as a framework. Justice is not, for those very two important reasons, in a position to be definitive when it comes to how much you are going to pay for legal fees because you simply do not know.

Thank you.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Minister.

I will now ask the committee members if there are any questions for discussion and you may begin.

The hon. the Member for Trinity North.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Thank you.

If it is okay with the Chair, the minister and members of the committee - I know it is a practice maybe to go category by category, but if we could, maybe we could make this a little bit simpler. There are only about four items in each of the groupings that we wanted to talk about very specifically. Then there were five different - generally things that we wanted to discuss that would come from any parts of this. Would that be an okay approach for everybody to do that?

MADAM CHAIR: Once the heads are called discussion can occur around any aspects of the department or the estimates.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Category1.2.02.05, Professional Services, on page 208. I appreciate the minister's comments and understand his reasoning for the comments. Just by way of explanation, last year's budget was $16,500, the revised was $235,000. Was that a situation similar to what you described a moment ago?

MR. PARSONS: No. What we are referring to here, actually, is Treasury Board has a number of funds in itself, in its department, what we call Organizational Development Initiatives and it comes from Treasury Board to the various departments each year, depending upon what initiatives that department might have.

In Justice - last year, for example, RNC training - sometimes there are cases where you do front line manager's training. You may do - I know we did do, in fact, youth care counsellor training regarding Whitbourne - suicide intervention type programs. There are cases where you sometimes pay tuition for your manager and staff so that they can take courses to improve their skills; in-service for both civil and criminal lawyers. So, the department had an extreme number of management type and departmental initiatives last year and they are funded from this ODI fund in Treasury Board.

Again, when we started out we estimated $16,500 not knowing what the initiatives were, but as the year unfolded many people in the department wanted to do these types of initiatives. So we were able to access this money in Treasury Board and make it available to them.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: The same question, only a different category, 2.1.01, Civil Law, that same point 05., Professional Services, an $800,000 increase from last year.

MR. PARSONS: No, what happened here - Professional Services, we received additional funding here from Treasury Board from the contingency reserve that government had. This involved various legal projects. Yes, there were overruns. I will give you an example, the Nova Scotia-Newfoundland boundary dispute. Albeit, the case was ongoing for a number of years. It took a higher profile in the last two years because it got to the stage where it actually went to the arbitration. So that was one of the things where the legal fees to Professor McRae, for example, (inaudible) to lead on it. It was vastly increased last year because the actual arbitration hearings took place last year.

FPI was another one. We had budgeted a certain amount of money, and given what had happened in the discussions surrounding FPI, we did not anticipate that we would end up with, for example, the high level of legal battles or scrimmages, shall we say, that went on involving the takeover by Clearwater. That was not anticipated when we did our budget. So that led to additional work. We ended up with the all-party committee that went around the Province, and we were providing legal opinions to them from time to time. That was another one.

Marystown Shipyard; we had budgeted a certain amount for Marystown. In fact, you will see we had estimated, when we were doing our budget this year, that we might need some more for Marystown. Now, given what has happening with White Rose, even since we drafted this document for this year's budget, the White Rose announcement has made us already have to shuffle because we do not think there is going to be a Marystown issue now in 2002-2003 because Marystown Shipyard has been sold. Again, it took on a high profile because the White Rose project had sanctioned because of the negotiations took place between Friede Goldman Newfoundland and Peter Kiewit. What was our role in it? What was the Newfoundland government's position on the penalty clause that was outstanding and so on?

So when you start out a year - it is one of those cases where you did not know that Marystown would take on the profile that it did, or FPI, or the boundary dispute. They escalated, and you overshoot what it cost us to do those.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: In that same category, just down a couple of lines, Allowances and Assistance, that $3.6 million increase last year.

MR. PARSONS: We are looking at .09 here?

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Yes.

MR. PARSONS: Again, that came from the contingency reserve of government for last year. We did not have enough money. We had to go back and request from Treasury Board additional funding for the contingency reserve. That ties into a number of cases that government had on the go that got settled.

There were, for example, as everyone seen in the media, outstanding wrongful dismissal actions. I believe there were thirty-two dating back to senior managers, going back as early as 1994, 1995 and 1996. They were settled, I think, somewhere in the vicinity of $1.9 million; those numbers. The thirty-two cases that we settled. The Gregory Parsons case was included in this, which has been widely reported in the media.

We had a matter involving the airport realty. Government some years ago expropriated the property near the airport here in St. John's, and that case has been unraveling for a number of years. There was finally a judgement out in 2001. We had some other cases involving sexual abuse allegations against various government agencies. There are dozens of those, in fact, and some of them get dealt with each year depending upon the status of each particular case. That is unfolding. There were a couple of cases involving motor vehicle accidents that Works, Services and Transportation officials were involved in that got resolved.

Again, it was a case, if you estimate your $2 million pot - and you will see that is the pot I was referring to when I said $2 million in .09. That pot has always been, for the last number of years, started off with a $2 million pot and you end up exceeding it, virtually, every year depending upon the number of settlements. These are some of the cases that were resolved last year that would add to that increase. The additional money we received, we had to go back to Treasury Board and tell them why the needs were there and what the needs were and then they gave us that money from the contingency fund.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: I am glad you identified that is where the funding comes from, because that was one of the broad categories that I wanted to talk a little bit about. Can you give us some sense of - I know it is difficult to predict what might be settled in any given year. I notice you are estimating $4 million this year, up from the original estimates from last year, so obviously you have some sense that there are going to be some settlements that are pending and could be settled in this fiscal year coming. Could you give us some sense of the numbers of cases and the dollar amounts associated with the statements of claim that currently are on record, that are outstanding and not settled?

MR. PARSONS: We have, against government right now - I wish I had brought the big book that Don Burrage, the director of -

SOME HON. MEMBERS: Oh, oh!

MR. PARSONS: No, no. There is something to the tune of - outstanding against government - in excess of 300 statements of claim. To get a value on each claim is virtually impossible because hardly any of them have a specified claim. Someone may be suing government for general damages. General damages would only be determined when you got to court. If you were to pick a figure out of the air, you have no relationship to reality. Those 300-plus cases could translate into, if every claimant got every penny and all of the cost that they wanted, and you assume government lost all 300 cases - which, by the way, the record does not show; we have won far more cases than government has resolved - it would be in the multi-multi-millions. Again, how long is it going to take to settle them?

Some people sue, for example, today, and their claim may never, ever get to court because they sue and as you go back to them and say, fine, give us the information, and the process unravels, lots of times it ends up being seven, eight years down the road. Sometimes people discontinue their actions because they say: Well, we know now we just cannot succeed. These people are not going to cave in and give us a cheque for no reason. We actually have to prove our case now.

There are all kinds of factors as to - the number you actually have against you may never translate into a dollar value. There will certainly be some dollar value, but what it is, trying to pinpoint it, is like a tail on the donkey game.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: How many are in the courts right now?

MR. PARSONS: Again, they are actually in the courts once they get issued. The process is that if a person sues government, they issue a statement of claim. The statement of claim becomes registered in the court. We have over 300 cases registered in the courts.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Let me rephrase the question. It was probably a poorly worded question. Those that you have trial dates set for, court dates set for, and you are actually proceeding with the court process, to make an argument -

MR. PARSONS: How many lawyers do we have in civil, Chris?

MR. CURRAN: We have thirty-three.

MR. PARSONS: We have thirty-three lawyers and each one of them has a caseload of how many files, roughly?

MR. CURRAN: It depends, obviously. Some of them are small. The Fisheries Loan Board, we have a lawyer down there who has over 400 files outstanding, but the average caseload would not unusually be between seventy and 100.

MR. PARSONS: I am calling the Fisheries Loan Board file one file. Within that one file of Fisheries Loan, for example, you may have, as Chris just said, 400 more individual files because there are 400 claims whereby government is suing people to get money back.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Let me ask the minister this question in terms of the 300 cases, and I commend you for the record. Despite sometimes you are the subject of some criticism for settlements or lost cases, I commend the minister and staff with respect to your comment on the number of cases that you actually win and are settled before going to trial.

Your earlier comment in your introduction talked about the difficulty you have in projecting, because it is associated with - you become the people who carry the cases but the problems originate or the case originates in some other department. You may not know it is out there pending or brewing today but it is coming up.

In your experience with the number of the cases that you are able to settle without a great deal of difficulty, if, in fact, government departments had a greater budgetary flexibility in settling some of these claims, or settling these disputes with people in the beginning, would they result in less cost and a great savings of time for both yourselves and your staff, and a saving of cost and time to the claimants themselves?

MR. PARSONS: No, I do not think. The process is not a simple one. We have a very good system now in Justice as to what is happening from government, within government and various government departments. Mr. Burrage is the Director of Litigation, we call him, so he has a handle. Actually, everything is, thanks to IT, computerized now so that we know on a daily basis when a claim starts, who is handling the claim, what department it is from, what is the nature of the claim, whether it is at a filing stage, a discovery stage, a trial stage, an application stage. It is very well-organized in that regard as to where it is going. At any given moment now we can tell you, which could not be done several years ago but now we can. So, from a cost perspective, there are no delays any more as to not knowing where a file is. That has been, in fact, an enhancement and a big savings by having IT.

We are not in the habit of settling for the sake of settling. There are no gains. We are looking after the public purse, is the bottom line here. It is not in the best interests of government, or certainly Justice, to settle so that a case goes away and you have one less number on your chart. That is not the name of this. If people want to extract money from government, they have to show that they have a valid claim. What we do in the department is, have an understanding of the law, have an understanding of their particular facts, so that we are confident, if any money is paid out, that it should be paid out and that the amounts we pay out are appropriate in line with any type of settlements or similar settlements anywhere else in the country.

Having more money available does not help that. Having a $5 million pot versus a $2 million pot at the beginning of the year does not make a difference because we do not care if you put a $50 million pot there. We are not going to go out and spend the $50 million simply to make fifty more cases go away. We still have to do the due diligence on every one of these cases. All we are saying as a department is: Understand when we start off on April 1, that we do not know if we are going to have fifty or one hundred. We will do our job. We will do the due diligence. We will make sure that all settlements are efficacious and officious as they should be, but when the time comes to pay the piper, we are just saying: If we have it in the pot, fine; if we do not, we will come back to you and say, we need extra money.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: I guess my question was - I didn't mean to imply that Justice should settle for the sake of settling. It was more an issue - let me give you an example. I have had, in the very short time that I have been an MHA, several opportunities on behalf of constituents to approach government departments on some issues that are disputes outstanding. On two occasions I have had the comment from a senior member of that department, or that particular department make a suggestion that: Even if I agreed with you and your constituent is right, and probably they are, I don't have the money to settle it anyway. If they want to pursue it through litigation and we settle it, then it comes out of someone else's budget.

I guess, as an MHA, having that comment made to me by a senior person in two different government departments is a little bit disturbing in that, number one, it is a miscarriage of justice, in some respects, I guess. The other one is, it is unfair treatment of the constituent or the general public. It also put an undue pressure on your department and your staff because it drives - these are unnecessary cases that might come across your desk and no doubt fall into the category of where you may, as you go through your exploratory phase and negotiate a settlement out of court and it does become a settled case, again, then, your budget and the settling of any case that has gone to court, the government automatically pays it, whereas at a departmental level there is some discussion around whether or not there is a legitimate claim. The senior person may agree that this is a legitimate claim but I do not have any money in the budget for it and I cannot get it. Therefore, the only way the person is going to get it is they go through the legal process.

That was more the point of my question. I guess I was asking the question around the numbers that you settle quickly. Do you find that there is a - I do not know the appropriate term, but I call them nuisance cases that would come to you, that you might say, yes, the department should have settled this much earlier before it came to my desk.

MR. PARSONS: That is what I am saying. The process is such now that the department official - first of all, the department would have no pot to settle the claim. Secondly, if there is a claim, it is no appropriate, I do not think, for the department official to make the call whether it should be settled or not. That is why we have a Department of Justice. If anybody in any department has a legal concern, it is our responsibility in Justice to make a determination whether it is, in fact, a nuisance case; whether, in fact, it requires to be paid.

I would suggest, if anyone is giving you that line that this is a nuisance case and this ought to be settled and they do not have the budget, that is probably not in order. By all means, refer any such incident you wish to this department, because if Justice is going to have the responsibility for looking after all legal cases you cannot have everybody in every department out there trying to negotiate the settlements. We have a process to do that, and that comes back to the Department of Justice to do it.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Thank you.

The other line item, and I will group them, in the category of Property, Furnishings and Equipment, across the whole Justice Department -

MR. PARSONS: Which page are you on?

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Actually, if you notice, on each of the subheads there is a grouping under 07. called Property, Furnishings and Equipment. It is under each of the groupings. If you go through each of those categories, and that particular expense category, in each of those heads the net amount is $1 million over budget spent last year in all areas within Justice, in that area of Property, Furnishings and Equipment. For example, I just happen to have it open now to 2.1.01. Civil Law. In that particular category there was a $12,000 over expenditure. If you add you the total across Justice, there is net amount of a little over $1 million in excess of budget spent on furniture and equipment last year.

MR. PARSONS: You are absolutely correct. In fact, I would refer you to page 215, Supreme Court, 3.1.01.07., Property, Furnishings and Equipment. You notice we had budgeted $16,000 and went to $742,400. In that particular case, that refers to the digital recording equipment that has been put into all of our courts of the Province, the Provincial and Supreme Courts Province-wide. So you are looking at a $1 million figure overall, but $700,000 of that in the Province has gone to digital recording. We had the earlier recording systems and, quite simply, they were archaic and could not be used, and were not reliable. In the justice system, if you do not have a record, you do not have a system. That is why it was imminent that we go get it. That money, by the way, as well came from a contingency fund as well. It was simply a case where the judges came to us, both the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court and the Supreme Court, and said: Either you have to help us out with this stuff or we have to close down shop. That is not an option.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Madam Chair, there are two other points that I have. The issue of the use of outside lawyers, what is Justice's practice in terms of the use of private practice lawyers?

MR. PARSONS: It depends on whether we have the speciality in-shop or not that we need. For example, if you are dealing with a criminal matter, we would have criminal lawyers in our criminal section with the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mr. Mills. We have Crown agents all around the Province who are staffed, salaried employees with Justice. There may come times when, for example, for various reasons; pregnancy leave, a vacancy comes about, that you do not one of your staff members so you may have to hire a criminal practitioner.

I believe in a case in Western Newfoundland, the senior Crown in Corner Brook left recently, which left a void, so we have given some private work to criminal lawyers to fill in that gap until we get someone re-hired in that position. That is on the criminal side of things. That does not happen very often. In fact, you will notice in this year's stats we thought we would farm out more work to private lawyers in criminal law and we actually ended up, I do not think, using any or using very little of it.

In the case of civil law, it depends on the area of expertise. For example, if you are doing a matter of royalty regimes for the offshore industry, we do not have the in-house expertise to deal with that type of venture. Most of the people who do have the expertise are what we call interprovincial or national type law firms. For example, here in the city there were three that even ranked, have the ability, to do an offshore one. You had Stewart McKelvey, which is a nationally recognized firm, you had Patterson Palmer, and you had Cox Hanson. What we do is, we have our staff - John McDonnell, I believe, actually, in that particular area, is our person who does have the most expertise in that field. He would analyze each of these law firms and see, okay, who has what we need, and make a recommendation to myself as to who he feels is best suited to do a particular job. So, that is the case on the offshore.

For example, in negotiating the Lower Churchill deal, you may need a certain expertise when it comes to what your agreements would be into the export of power. What are interprovincial export agreements that you would require? You may need someone in the case of maritime law, like we did in the Nova Scotia boundary dispute. We hired Professor McRae, who is a world recognized lawyer on international maritime law.

I guess, in a nutshell, it depends on the nature of the work and who you think is best able to give you the expertise you need so that you can win your cases, or, in the case of generic regimes, it is not a case of winning; it is a case of making sure that you have the best regime that works best for your Province.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Just one other question, Madam Chair, if I could. It is more of a personal or constituency or district issue. I noticed in the last couple of years, Justice has not gotten a whole lot of capital budget; there is still the outstanding issue of a new court in Clarenville. Is that anywhere on the radar screen?

MR. PARSONS: Shall we say we have a big screen, and each of the rings on my radar screen are, I think, about five miles in width and there are about twelve rings, and it is in the outer ring.

On a serious note, the two issues we had, when it comes to buildings in the property for courthouses, the number one priority, acknowledged by everybody, was in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. The second priority was Clarenville Provincial Court.

We have been lucky in this year. You notice in the budget we have an allotment - it actually gets dealt with in Works, Services and Transportation - to look after the Happy Valley-Goose Bay situation. I guess that is good news in the case of Clarenville because the number one priority is now gone, or ought to be gone this year or in the near future, which means that the Clarenville situation will become the number one for a provincial court.

I would caution, however, that those priorities were set long before my time here. Since that, I know there have been serious concerns raised about the Court of Appeal situation here in St. John's. In fact, I visited at the Court of Appeal and I visited at the Provincial Court in Clarenville, and I could not, personally, put one ahead of the other. I think they are both antiquated. I think they are both desperately in need of replacement. So, it will come down to a judgement call at that time, but there is certainly no plan right now to get that done this year and, to my knowledge, next year. It depends always upon the availability of resources to do it. We all know the budgetary deficit situation within which we work.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Thank you.

That is all, Madam Chair. Thank you.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Mr. Wiseman.

The hon. the Member for Harbour Main-Whitbourne.

Do you have any questions or comments?

MR. HEDDERSON: Certainly, Madam Chair.

I just want to go through, as did my colleague, some items, and just begin with the RNC. Basically we hear from different municipalities, from different parties, from indeed perhaps even the RNC themselves, that enforcement in certain areas is not at a level that it should be. I am just looking overall at the item. I do notice a decrease, so I am wondering how that is playing out because, again, for the field enforcement. I have attended the insurance forums and that sort of thing, and I am hearing from insurance stakeholders, I guess, that more enforcement is needed if we are going to bring down the number of accidents and so on and so forth.

I just want to get a feel from you, Minister, as to: Is this a cutback even further in enforcement, or is there something built in there to keep the level what it is or even perhaps increase it?

MR. PARSONS: Over the years since the early 1990s, just to give a little bit of background here so we have some context, I believe it was up in the upper-390s that we used to have for the RNC. That has decreased substantially over time - 360. Today's figures, we have about 305, so we have had a fifty-five person reduction in that time period. So, yes, the numbers are down. We have added back, actually. In the last couple of years, we have been trying to put numbers back in.

It is a concern from a number of fronts. When you do not have your police, besides the whole aspect of safety, do you feel safe in your own community, that is the principal thing. Within that envelope you have a number of things. For example, do we have more break and enters? Where are they having the break and enters? We know, for example, in the case of pharmacies, the number of break-ins into pharmacies in our area have increased dramatically. That is tied into a lot of factors, one of which may be, for example, someone who cannot get the prescription drugs that they want all of a sudden break into pharmacies. They might not normally be a criminal but, because they have an addiction problem, they become a criminal in order to feed their habit, and an obvious place to hit is pharmacies. That causes severe problems for the staff because one time, instead of breaking in at 2:00 a.m., we have had a couple of incidents where they walked in the front door with a piece of lumber under their arm and demand that they get the drugs. We have seen an escalation in the type and nature of the crimes.

Traffic Enforcement: If you only have so many bodies, there are only so many things that you can do. You cannot do traffic enforcement if you have had eight murder investigations ongoing, or if you have four drug investigations ongoing. That takes away from doing the things you would like to do, like having police officers out on highway patrol here on the outer ring road, for example. You have to prioritize what it is you can do with the manpower you have.

Another problem we add here is: How do you utilize the manpower you do have? We had a system here, for example, and I won't speak as to the validity of how it came about or why it came about, but we have a situation here, as I understand it, that is called equal shifting. So, if you have three shifts a day, you pretty well have the same number of officers on each shift. Now, I am a firm believer that you do not need as many police officers on Sunday between 8:00 a.m. and 4: 00 p.m. as you would need on George Street on a Friday night.

That is a collective bargaining piece that we are into that has to be changed through collective bargaining. It is one thing to have 306 officers and say, that is not enough; it is something else to have 306 and not even be utilizing them to their maximum capabilities because you have this equal shifting. That has been a major issue of concern, and numerous discussions on trying to get it changed. I think that is a big piece into our resourcing, if we can get rid of that current system, and that is being worked on. It is a case of having the resources and using them the best we can.

Another example, anybody who has watched the media, we have had thousands and thousands in the last year, of alarm system calls which get fed in; they go into the fire department here in St. John's. For example, you may live in Conception Bay South and your security alarm goes off. It goes into the fire department and someone in the fire department takes the 911 call, farms it out to the RNC - because it is a security call, not a fire alarm then - it is queued out to the RNC. It goes into a queue and somebody has to respond to that fire alarm. It takes an officer, usually two, because it is a security situation - it is a break-in, so they will not send one officer; you have to send two - to that scene and see what is going on.

We have had thousands of those in the last year. Ninety-eight point five per cent of all security calls are false. We have worked it out that we have used something like 168 person days on false alarms. We have numerous alarm companies that come into the Province. They will come to an individual and say: Would you buy my security alarm system and have it installed in your home because it keeps your home safe? You will pay money for the system. You will pay money to have it installed. In fact, you will pay them $50 per month more, plus, so that if your alarm goes off, the call rings probably somewhere in Alberta, and someone in Alberta will answer your alarm call, in the case of those private alarms, and call the RNC here in Newfoundland and say: We have a call on Logy Bay Line. We need you to go check out that call. Again, the RNC get dispatched to look after it and it is a false alarm because Joe, who came home, probably forgot to turn off his alarm when he entered his home or whatever and said: Oh, gee, I forgot. Sorry.

How many times do you forget? Somebody has to pay for this, and right now it is the people of the Province who are paying for it. Should the alarm companies be paying for it, or should the people who has it installed and makes the unnecessary false alarms due to simple non-awareness on their own part? Should there be a system whereby you have three strikes and you are out sort of thing. You make three strikes on a false alarm and we are not coming anymore. Or, if you make three strikes, we are charging you a fee. If it takes us $200 to respond to a call, that is what we have to do?

If you were to put together the equal shifting element, and if you add to that the number of false alarm situations, and if you add to that that we have had a lot of sickness and overtime being used by the RNC, it is a major problem to deal with. I do commend - in fact, we have had Chief Rick Deering on board here now from the OPP before he came here, who I think has done a fantastic job in using the resources he has. He will acknowledge, as I do, we would love to have more, we would love to have the money to give them more, but he is also what I call top shelf because he knows that money is not the only problem. He, as well, understands that there are some systemic problems that we have to work on. I must say, he is doing an admirable job working on them.

District policing, for example, that did not exist before. He is into this full scale. In fact, what started out last year to be a four-district system is now being re-evaluated again to go into a three-district system because they have had a year to work with it, saw where it has to be tweaked now. He has also set up a traffic unit. We had severe problems with traffic unit. I think the number of traffic tickets issued, because they took a number of personal and dedicated them to that task, I think the number of traffic tickets went up by thousands and thousands in the course of the last number of months.

Even though we cannot, for example, have all the officers on highway patrol every day or on traffic, he has a dedicated unit which is doing a very efficient job, which is getting the message out that you have to be law-abiding or else you are going to get ticketed.

MR. HEDDERSON: Thank you, Minister.

Just again with regard to both the RNC and RCMP, the enforcement you just spoke about, one of the other areas that I have seen myself and I have heard other people talk about is the aspect of the community police service, where you do have liaison officers in high schools and so on and so forth out in the community. In many cases we have to convince the officers to certainly volunteer their time to do these sorts of things. I wonder, what is the extent of this difficulty? Are you aware of it, and what is the extent of it? Because I just hear from my own district or from my own school or something along those lines. Has this been brought to your attention? Has there been any thought into increasing it or addressing the needs?

MR. PARSONS: Yes, it is an issue. I think it varies from different places in the Province. Some communities themselves are far more involved in their community policing initiatives and crime prevention initiatives than others. For example, the crime prevention group in Clarenville are extremely active and involved in community policing initiatives. Others are not. There are some places in the Province that have tried to get it up and started and they just have not gotten started.

You are quite right; in a lot of these cases it is the officers who give of their time voluntarily because they are concerned and want to make sure there is a connection between the policing agency and the community, particularly when it comes to youth. I find there are a lot of connections between police officers who take an interest in being there for youth organizations and community youth programs. Again, you wish you had the money to be able to pay them for what they give because their service, like firemen and everybody else in our communities, is invaluable, albeit it is voluntary.

I would point out as well that, when it comes to the RNC, we cannot forget that in our Province of half-a-million, the RNC police probably the bulk of the people, albeit not geographically in area, but the Northeast Avalon, the Corner Brook region and Labrador City. I think we have made some advances in the last couple of years that are going to pay off in the long run; one being binding arbitration. I think if you spoke to any officer of any policing unit, if you are comfortable in your job and you feel you are being adequately compensated, it gives you a better feeling about your job and better morale about your job, and the desire to help out voluntarily, even if you have to, than if you do not feel as if you are being properly compensated; and I think we have made that shift, at least, in the RNC. We will see the results of it in May because we put through the legislation last year to have binding arbitration. The arbitrators have been appointed and that decision will be coming out at the end of May. So, I think we have done that from a morale point of view. They know that it is not a case any more of government saying: Go get an arbitrator and when you come back government yanks it away from them. It is binding arbitration now for the RNC. So I think that has changed, from an RNC perspective, how a lot of the officers approach the job now. There will hopefully be some fairness now, or a higher degree of pay for them.

If you want to compare that to the RCMP, we will probably never, on a provincial policing force, be able to compare with the financial remuneration of the RCMP. We are eons apart and I do not think it is even credible to compare our RNC payment to what the RCMP get paid federally, but at least if we can get them in the ballpark with other major regional police forces, I think that will be a giant step and that will impact positively on morale and that will impact positively on their ability to be involved in community policing.

Incidentally, the whole concept of the policeman walking the beat is gone. We have been into now, with district policing, and you talk to the RCMP and the RNC, everything is a community policing model. The whole model, itself, is based on that, so I think we are making big strides to get there but we have a ways to go.

MR. HEDDERSON: Thank you, Minister.

Adult Corrections, if I might - once again, I plead ignorance to some of these areas, as you can well imagine, but one of the aspects that I would just like to bring up is with regard to Her Majesty's Penitentiary. I just want a feel for, you know - I heard a report not long ago about overcrowding in cells, and so on and so forth. Overall, first, is there an increase in the number of inmates at that facility? What has changed, if anything, and is it an issue? Is the problem being addressed? Perhaps that is the best I can bring forth to you, Minister.

MR. PARSONS: Okay.

Just to give you the geography again and the physical setup. HMP is here in St. John's. We have a number of units in HMP because you have different security risks. For example, we do have an intermittent unit. What that does is: The courts, for example, may take somebody who is impaired driving for the second time and serves an automatic fourteen days in jail - that is not someone you would take and put in with the general inmate population. They might even be told to serve their time on weekends. So, they are called intermittents. You might have a number of people in the region. You would not put your intermittents, who go in on a Friday and come out on a Monday, in with your GP or your general population. That is one unit.

You may have a unit for segregation, people who are in the institution for whatever reason. It may be that they had trouble with some other inmate, they may have been a discipline problem, or they may, for their own protection in the institution, require segregation. So, you have a segregation unit that you keep them in.

Then you have general population that you may put people in, and you also have a unit for what they call remand. There are two types of things. If a person commits murder and is charged with murder, while you are waiting for your case to be heard and the charges heard and get sentenced, you are not yet a sentenced inmate. You are a prisoner, but you are on remand. You cannot put, in our system, a remand person in with a sentenced person. You cannot put a remand person in with a person who is already sentenced. That is the setup in an institution. So, who comes in varies greatly.

If you have a number of serious crimes, for example, committed over the weekend, they may be remand prisoners, because you might have had a murder, you may have had an armed robbery, you may have had other physical violence type crimes. If you end up on Monday having fifteen persons remanded, when your remand unit normally accommodates twelve, obviously you have an overflow in your remand. You are always subject, in your institution, to having what the courts give you. You cannot pick who your patrons are going to be. They may be remands, they may be intermittents, or they may be sentenced individuals.

That is the setup inside and you cannot mix these. Even within each of these, you may have a mixture. You may, for example, in general population, have a case of some individuals who are deemed to be high security. You may have others who are deemed to be low security risks. So, even within each, you have different classifications that you have to have.

In the Penitentiary down here, we are rated for 145 beds. We double bunk and double bunking is something that does not happen anywhere else in Canada or in North America. We double bunk. The cells are equipped to double bunk. The problem is: We usually double bunk up to about 160. It is if you go over 160 that you can have problems, because then you are double bunking and the cells are not physically equipped with two bunks. So, the double bunking is happening with one person in the bunk and the other person has a mattress on the floor.

The major concern is not the hygiene. The person still has to be able to shower and be kept clean and that kind of stuff. They still have to have food prepared properly. We do not encounter difficulties when the numbers go up with the hygiene or the food parts. What happens is: It depends upon the nature again of the individuals coming in. If they are all high risk security threats, you have to make sure that you have adequate staff to handle them. You have to be careful again, as you always do: Who do you house with whom? Because your numbers are up - and I think it is a pretty standard fact of human socialization - the more people you have together, the more likely you are to have an argument, probably, particularly if you are in a tense stressful situation like a penitentiary. You are more likely to have an argument if you have fifty people on a block than if you have twenty. It is a fact of life. So, because you have to anticipate that you have to bring in the bodies to do it.

That is the context within which we work now; the court typically. We are trying to identify exactly why. We have operated at HMP for the last four years at about 85 per cent capacity. I mean, this is totally unexpected and contrary to the norm, what we have seen in the last two weeks; let's not kid ourselves. We have gone for four years. We have had daily stats as to who is in and who is on what unit. We have always run at about 85 per cent capacity for the last four years. In the last number of weeks we are at 115 per cent capacity.

In that mix, by the way, we keep federal penitentiary people in our penitentiaries. There may be Newfoundlanders, for example, who are doing federal time or other federal prisoners and we can put them in our institution here, and we have some in our institution in Stephenville. Great financial system for us, particularly when we were at 85 per cent in our institution. Every time we could bring in a federal prisoner it was great, because it added money to our coffers. We make money off having federal prisoners. The downside to this is, of course, if your own provincial count goes up we have to ship those federals out. We were doing great for awhile in the sense that we were running at about 85 per cent capacity, we were having federal prisoners come in which helped offset some of the costs of the institution, and in the last two or three weeks we have ended up with 115 per cent capacity. We are trying to identify now what is going on here.

There are a couple of factors as to what could cause this. Number one is: How successful are the police sometimes, because the number of people that come out at the end of your court system often depends on who goes in. How many go in often is a factor of - God bless them - how good the police do in their job and how successful they are in stopping crime. That is good thing in itself, that we are getting that happening on that end.

The other thing is: Once they come out of the system, what does the judge do with them? Are they getting community service like you often see or they getting longer sentences? What we are finding recently is that they are getting longer sentences. If they are getting longer sentences they are in there for a longer period of time and again that is why they are taking up room. They would normally be in and out. Therefore, they are not in and out anymore as frequently as they were, they are staying for longer periods of time when they do go in which leads to your numbers going up.

The other thing is the seriousness of the crimes for which they are being sentenced. If you put ten people in Her Majesty's Penitentiary today with a conviction for assault versus putting ten people in today for armed robbery, assessed to be very high risk security type people, the latter are less likely to be allowed out on temporary absences or released earlier. Again, we deal with the patrons they send us and you assess them when they come in. If they come in and they are eligible under the criteria to be released early or to be released on TAs, you can do that.

We happen to have a combination come here where they are coming out of the court systems, there are longer sentences, and they are high-risk type persons whom you cannot give temporary absences to. Strangely enough, out of the count, for example, yesterday, we had 160. It was only last week, by the way, the number went over 160, up to 176 and 177. Actually, I think they shot up to 190 at one point. That is why we ended up double bunking thirty additional that we never ever had to do. Yesterday the count was back down to 160 again, but of that 160, 59 of them were remands. In other words, persons who have been charged but not through the system. That is the highest number of remands in anybody's history that they can recall at HMP in the Province. So, this has all happened at one time and we have to make accommodations for it.

I can understand the concerns raised by Mr. Puddester, because when you have this situation, if it is going to be more volatile and stressful, you have to make sure you have the staff there to look after that. That is why I said publicly, as well, we cannot be upset because we have the problem. We have to manage the problem and you manage the problem by handling the people today, making sure you have proper staff, competent staff - which we certainly have in our correctional officers - to do it, and then try to figure out what has caused this. Is it an aberration or is it going to be a consistent thing? If it is going to be a consistent thing, how do we plan so that we have proper accommodations to look after them in the future.

MR. HEDDERSON: Just as a followup to that, minister.

Again, what is your feel on it? Every so often you shoot up to 190. Is it once a month or once every two months? Are we going to have to deal with it or will we just go on as we are going now?

MR. PARSONS: This is the first time in four years. We have had 85 per cent occupancy that ballooned to 115 for the first time in four years. We cannot make a decision to change the system based on a once in four years aberration.

MR. HEDDERSON: That would be my concern. If it continues, obviously, you are going to deal with that as a continuance, right?

MR. PARSONS: Yes.

MR. HEDDERSON: Just to go back to the RCMP. The highway patrol - obviously, I represent a rural district and I travel the highway just about every day. One of the complaints from a constituent - not a lot of us complain when we go over the highway sometimes and do not see any RCMP. Basically, I know there is difficulty across the Province with regard to the highway patrol and especially our stretch of road now between here and Whitbourne. We have some new difficulties with regard to speed and so on and so forth. With regard to the highway patrol, is that an internal decision on their part, the RCMP, or is that direction from your department? Who makes the decision as to who patrols, how many patrol, or whatever?

MR. PARSONS: That is absolutely an operational decision and the operational decisions are made by the RCMP brass. We have no authority and it would be totally inappropriate for us to try to direct them as to how they direct their operations. Now they do come to us and say: We feel we need more highway patrol. But that is not an operational, that is a resourcing issue. We would say: Okay, we have to try to find the funds and come up with the extra bodies that you need, the FTEs.

The way the system works with the feds and the RCMP in the Province, of the contract we pay 70 per cent and the feds pay 30 per cent. So every time we buy a body, we know we are on the hook for 70 per cent of that extra body and plus whatever goes with it. We have been lucky in the last number of years. I think we put four or five back onto the highway. We have secured enough resources that they have added some back in. One of their biggest problem areas - there is one on this end because you have the double highway, but at least with the double highway on the eastern part of the Province, you have the protection of having a double highway.

We have a situation on the other end of the Province where we had in excess of 400,000 people per year coming into the Province, and we had a single highway and not as much enforcement as you had on the eastern end. That was a concern. So they have in the last couple of year revamped their highway patrol on the other side. On the western end, which happens to be my district, by the way - I have lived this personally - you get every tractor trailer that comes onto this Island, and everybody who comes onto this Island, after sitting for four to six hours on the boat, just booming to get as fast and as far as they can. So that was a real problem, which I think they are getting a better handle on. I have noticed personally there have been some increase in the number of highway enforcement. So again, to your question: We do not (inaudible) the operations.

Another priority with them - and I have to point this out - is in Labrador, because over the last number of years they have given us an extra amount of focus to policing in Labrador in terms of Hopedale; Cartwright has been reestablished, which was closed out; Makkovik has been beefed up and so on. Again, they come to us and tell you what we need. We wish we had more to give them. We only ever give them, I think, about 5 per cent of what they ask for. It is not because it is all we want to, but that is all we have. The needs are vast and the amounts are little.

MR. HEDDERSON: The Access to Information Act, of course, has been on the legislative agenda and has moved past the legislative agenda now. A question, first of all: The cost of implementation of this act, I guess, is reflected in your Estimates for this particular year. Again, Minister, has the act been proclaimed yet? It hasn't been proclaimed yet, has it? Has the act been proclaimed?

MR. PARSONS: No, the act has not been proclaimed. In fact, the act will be proclaimed in stages. As you will recall, in our Freedom of Information Act, we have had two substantial pieces here, policy pieces, on the Ombudsman and FOI in the last twelve months. On the FOI piece, the same person is going to oversee the implementation and operations of these two acts. That would be the Ombudsman, Fraser March. They fulfill two very different roles, of course, these two pieces of legislation.

The FOI has in it a piece called the privacy piece, Part IV. We have never ever had a privacy piece in our FOI legislation in the Province. As you all know, our FOI was twenty years old and we have revamped it substantially and put this privacy piece into it. That is going to be proclaimed even further after the act. I think it is April, 2003, tentatively, that we are looking at that piece, even, and the proclamation on the act is October of this year, with Part IV coming in April of next year.

You notice on page 211 we have referred to a sum here for Freedom of Information, amount voted $105,000. We do not feel - and I do not mind saying - at all that this is substantial for the requirements that the FOI is going to take. The House of Assembly have given a budget to the Ombudsman to do certain things as an Ombudsman and as an FOI appeal officer. This is here because Justice has been designated in the Act as the coordinating department for all departments of government, which is separate again from the role that he has to do as an Ombudsman. Any money that he needs, he is obviously going to take it up with the House of Assembly. This money here refers to Freedom of Information vis-à-vis government coordination of FOI requests.

For example, what if somebody put in a request to Post-Secondary Education, how does anybody in the vast system of government keep track of it? What if we don't know if we can or we cannot release it? Who do we go to, to find out if we need some interpretation of this? So, Justice has been decided upon as the department that would coordinate what happens in each department. When a request goes in, for example, there are very strict time lines on the act. How does anyone in the department record it that when it comes in, what happens to it after it comes in, how is the information compiled to answer that request, who gets the information once compiled, who copies it, and who gets it back to the party who requested it? So, this is a coordination role and we do not feel, at all, that this is going to be sufficient even as a coordination.

The $75,000 referred to there is a salary. That is only the manager who is going to look after the FOI unit as a coordinator from Justice. This does not even include a legal counsel yet. We are going to have to use the legal counsel from our civil division to give the advice that is necessary to support the FOI implementation. So, I have no doubt, and I think everybody in government recognizes and the Treasury Board recognizes, that the FOI that we have now is a ongoing process. Everybody fully expects that this thing is going to grow, and that we will need more bodies, we will need more resources. I think it is understood that this is a starting point that we have here, but I think everybody also agrees, too, that it was an important policy initiative that the people wanted and that the government is committed to doing.

Just to give you an example, I think, the FOI Commissioner in Saskatchewan, which has a pretty sparse population and probably not too far out of line versus us in terms of population, they have ninety-seven people administering their FOI department. That will give you some idea of how big this thing can get if it unfolds to -

MR. HEDDERSON: So, basically, the cost of implementation is in doubt. Is that what you are saying, or the cost of running the system after it is up and running is in doubt?

MR. PARSONS: It is unknown. There is no doubt about it. It is not in doubt. There is no doubt. It is not in doubt. The doubt is very real. We know there are going to be extra costs. You have not even factored in here, for example, the Information Management Systems. That is what a lot of people do not see. There are only a couple of departments of government that manage their information. The Executive Council does. Justice has a pretty good handle on it. If you were to go to some departments, for example, under our new Freedom of Information Act, and ask the deputy minister to please provide me with what you have there from 1992 vis-à-vis such and such, it is not a case that the person does not want to give it to you. The person has no way of finding it, because there was no system in place when it was ever put in there. We have to go back, basically, with this initiative and rebuild the whole Information Management System so that, hopefully, twenty-five years out, if somebody makes a request for FOI and then you walk into post-secondary and ask for something, somebody says: Oh, yes, we filed that in the year 2007, and you will know how to track it down and how to dig it out. That is a piece of this puzzle that we know there is no doubt the numbers are huge to put these Information Management Systems in place. That is going to have to be unfolded over the next number of years in order to make FOI work properly.

MR. HEDDERSON: On another matter, of course, the tobacco industry and recovery of costs and so on, that was a big issue and still remains a big issue. Again, just in a general sense, has there been anything taken into account? First of all, are you proceeding with court action and are there any estimates included in this year to cover the cost of that litigation?

MR. PARSONS: We are handling the tobacco file in-house. There are two pieces too it. One is a legal piece, which again is in-house, and the other piece is the research piece. We started this off with British Columbia. They had initiated the thing. We followed their lead and put our legislation in place so we had a foundation. We did a House of Assembly committee hearings on the thing. We subsequently went ahead with our legislation.

The problem in taking on the tobacco companies - I realize I say this, being taped - is that they are multinational and they are very wealthy, and we know that to be successful you have to have your homework done, your research done properly, your statement of claim properly formulated, your legislative foundation and framework in place, and you probably need a vast resource base financially to pursue this to success. In Canada, you are probably going to be best able to do this the more partners that you have. I will be very intentionally circumscript in what I am saying here in some regards. We are currently involved with B.C. in dealing with this matter and having negotiations with several other jurisdictions in order to move this forward. Some provinces do not see health care recovery as a high priority, probably because they have some major tobacco-growing interest in their provinces. Other provinces see it as a priority, not as high as we do, such as New Brunswick. Quebec is very heavily involved in it now, wanting to pursue it. We have continued to do our research angle, continued the last year to do our legal preparation angle, and probably more importantly we have continued to communicate with other jurisdictions to line up the other parties that we need to join in what we know is a big fight, a costly fight, that is probably going to last several years yet.

MR. HEDDERSON: Minister, where does the federal government - I know you have mentioned provinces there. Is there any possibility, is there anywhere in the world that, I guess, a country perhaps, have taken on the tobacco companies? I guess the United States would be my next (inaudible). Is there any precedent? First of all, the involvement of us, as a country, federally; and, secondly, is there any precedence around other than Canada?

MR. PARSONS: There is no precedent, that I am aware of, where a country sued the tobacco companies. I know in the United States, different states banned together and sued different tobacco companies in that fashion, in addition to the hundreds of individuals who sued, and I believe there are even some cases of class actions where they have tried to launch suits against a company and been very successful in the United States.

The federal government of the United States, to my knowledge, was not involved in any of these cases. They are not involved in suing the tobacco companies in Canada either. That is one of the groups we are continuing to negotiate with. The federal government had, and this is in the public realm, a fairly high profile public battle with the tobacco companies in another matter, and that was in how they shipped tobacco taxes; and, in fact, they lost. Rather than sue in Canada, they took a different approach than we would have taken and they went to the United States and sued in the United States courts and lost. We are again encouraging them that the best way to go about doing this is, all of us do it together, not only provinces and territories but have the federal umbrella there because there is strength in numbers in this game. There is strength in numbers.

MR. HEDDERSON: Mothers Against Drunk Drivers certainly brought to our Legislature the possibility or the hope that ignition interlocks would be used. As you know, I think both sides of the House certainly supported that sort of initiative. Again, my question is: Have you looked at the feasibility of employing that type of device? What are the results? Is there anything, again in this year, that we could expect to see happen with regard to that?

MR. PARSONS: Ms Mercer, who is a very vocal advocate for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, in fact, was a committee member. We struck a committee, a departmental committee, a couple of years ago that consisted of Government Services and Lands. Justice was involved, and Works Services and so on, to look at a number of issues, one of which was the interlock. The committee also recommended - I think Mr. Mills was a member of that committee.

WITNESS: One of the prosecutors from our division was.

MR. PARSONS: We have stiffened certain penalties, for example, that are coming out in terms of regulations, licence suspension as a result of convictions for impaired driving and so on. That has been done.

On the interlock, there was a problem and the committee, in fact, would not endorse the interlock system, albeit there was an all-party resolution of government a couple of years back put forward by Mr. Ottenheimer and unanimously endorsed by all government. When the committee looked at it, there were a lot of practical problems that the interlock system presented. Ms Mercer was a party to all of this as well. We actually brought in the people from Alberta who have done it in Alberta and are trying to do it now in Ontario, and Saskatchewan is looking at doing it. A lot of it has to do with - the costing is not an issue because, if you are impaired and you want to use an interlock, you should bear the cost of having an interlock, if you want to use it. So, that was fairly well a no-brainier as to the cost piece, but the practicality became: How do you give an interlock system to a place like Newfoundland? What happens to the guy who lives in Cook's Harbour, who goes to court in St. Anthony, is convicted, and says: Yes, I hear about this system that you have called interlock. I want to use it too.

Unfortunately, there is a physical set-up where you have to calibrate these machines that are on to the vehicles. They are costly to have, these calibration services. Will you put one in every community? Do you put one in regions in the Province? What is the cost of doing this? So, that was all gone through at this committee stage. Quite frankly, there were people who still claim that the interlock gives you nothing. What does it give you? What does it do? There is no correlation between having an interlock system on cars and decreasing impaired driving. All interlock is doing is somebody who has been convicted of impaired driving is now being given an opportunity that, if they have the bucks, they can put an interlock device on their car to drive. Take that to its logical step of: What does that have to do with stopping impaired driving?

Other than that particular individual who wants to pay the bucks to show that I can get in my car and not be drunk, blow into a machine, prove I am not drunk and my car will start and I can go. What does that do if Tom Hedderson and Kelvin Parsons are out in a club and you are the person who has the interlock on your car, and me and you come out of the club and I have not been drinking that night - or someone else, a friend of ours, has not been drinking, and we get him to blow into the machine to start the car and then me and you drive home. There are a lot of practicalities: Who blows in the machine, and that kind of thing. Whether it is workable, whether there is any connection to decreasing impaired driving, there are a lot of considerations there.

Anyway, that was why the committee did not endorse it. I went back because I appreciate the concerns of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Ms Mercer, and I also appreciate that if there is anything that, even if it not fully understood yet, which might reduce impaired driving, I think we ought to take a crack at it.

I went back to Minister Noel in Government Services and Lands and suggested that we should at least have a pilot project. It is agreed now that we will do a pilot project on the Northeast Avalon. It has been to Cabinet and it has been approved and it will be announced very soon. That is where it has come but I personally, still, having been party to all of this, have severe reservations about the effectiveness of the interlock system, as to what it will accomplish if anything.

MR. HEDDERSON: With regard to youth services, as you are aware, of course, the youth centre is in my district so it is a combination of some district concerns as well as anything. Obviously in the past year there has been a change with regard to the remand centre, the youth centre. First of all, with regard to the youth centre, I understand that numbers are going down. Is that in fact true, Minister? Just on the incarceration part of it, not the remand part.

MR. PARSONS: Absolutely not. On the incarceration, again, we have had a blip that happened yesterday that, to the knowledge of anybody in the Department of Justice, is the first time it ever occurred. We have sixty units at the Whitbourne institute and it went up the night before last to sixty-three. It has never happened. We had three persons in a classroom. Again, that causes concern, but again we are trying to identify the reasons because everything in Canada and everything statistically indicates that your incarceration rates for youth, particularly, are going down. The facts all say in Canada, from Stats Canada, the crime rates are going down, the rates of incarceration are going down, because judges are giving more conditional sentences and everything, and yet here we are in the last two weeks we have had two complete off-the-wall aberrations in our number of people. That is what we are trying to get a handle on.

With regard to the overtures, and we certainly hope it does not continue and that there is some aberration or reason to explain what has happened here, we had a system, and everybody is aware that Pleasantville has been decommissioned or is in the process of being decommissioned. It was a major initiative. We have, for youth, a facility at Pleasantville and we have a facility at Whitbourne called the Newfoundland and Labrador Youth Centre at Whitbourne. At Pleasantville, what happens is: If a person got picked up, for example, on Water Street tonight and the courts do not open until tomorrow morning, where do we put them? The police would take them up to Pleasantville and that is where they were housed. It was sort of an interim arrangement. They would be taken to the courts the next day and dealt with by the courts. They might need some medical counselling and so on. They may have to go and see a psychiatrist or whatever, so they were at Pleasantville.

Once the courts in the Province decided that they were remanded or interned for a period of time, then they would go to Whitbourne. So, Pleasantville was more of a holding centre type set-up as in not intended to be long term. Sixty at Whitbourne, ten at Pleasantville. The numbers went down so low that you did not need a Pleasantville. You had staff out at Pleasantville who, quite frankly, we never had anybody for them to look after because the numbers were so low. Made for ten, quite often had two, and I don't mean two for a day; I mean two for months. So, we looked at it and said: We have to have a system that is better than this. You cannot have ten or twelve people on high-paying jobs, plus the operational cost of the institution, for these kinds of numbers, that had gone on for years.

So, we decided what we would do is, we would decommission Pleasantville. We would put an attachment to the side of the RNC; not in the basement, as some would suggest. We would have a properly architecturally designed facility next to the RNC that we have in St. John's; because, let's remember, practically, it is the RNC who picks them up. They get picked up by the RNC at 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m., whatever, and they need somewhere to go. You cannot run them out to Whitbourne in the middle of the night. It takes time, it takes manpower, and it is probably not even safe with some of our driving conditions in the wintertime. So, we are going to have a facility with five beds attached to the RNC, instead of the ten that you currently have at Pleasantville. Pleasantville will be gone. Instead of having to have a staff at Pleasantville, that we had, of those numbers, we will have a facility attached to the RNC that will become that interim place.

They will be dealt with in the courts the next day. If they are remanded, they will be taken then by deputy sheriffs, because we already have another platoon in addition to youth counsellors. We have a group of people, deputy sheriffs, who serve the function of taking people to and from court. The deputy sheriffs will then transport them from the courts when they are finished, or finished their medical appointments at the end of the day or whatever, and they will be transported back to Whitbourne and kept in Whitbourne.

Again, the next morning they know out there, for example, that Johnny and Jack and Jane and Mary have court appearances on Duckworth Street that morning so the person, the deputy sheriff, will pick them up that morning and transport them into St. John's. They will do their work and see their medical appoints and get their court things done. Rather than having them waiting down in the courthouse, they may not have a court case until 2 o'clock. They won't be left sitting on the cells down in the courthouse, necessarily. They could be sat at the RNC place, if they wish. There is a visiting room there if they want to see their lawyer, if they want to see their psychiatrist, if they want to see their folks. That can all be done now once that - the problem is that place is not built yet, that place is going to be finished the end of this year. So, we have left Pleasantville open. The system is all in place, that they are going out to Whitbourne. That is all designed and the construction is actually going on at the RNC.

So, we have Pleasantville here. The other night, of course, they ended up in a classroom, the three overflows. We fully realize that if it goes over we cannot be using a classroom. We have to bring them to Pleasantville, continually use that until such time as the RNC place is finished.

The count last night, by the way, went down to fifty-eight from sixty-three.

AN HON. MEMBER: The Juno's.

MR. PARSONS: It may be the Juno's. I never thought of that. That might be it.

MR. HEDDERSON: Maybe we had the wrong kind of spinoff from (inaudible).

I know, obviously, the population of youth is declining as we see in school populations. I just had to ask that question.

Again, more from a district concern, because this transaction now from Pleasantville to Whitbourne to eventually the RNC has ramifications in my district, because a lot - not a lot - but some of my local constituents in Whitbourne certainly work at the youth centre. With the transition now as the remand workers bump into Whitbourne and then bump back, perhaps, out to the RNC, there are concerns because some of my local constituents are bumped from more permanent now to casual. My fear always is that it is going to have implications, because if they are on a casual list for any length of time I am going to lose them from my district. They are going to move on or look for work somewhere else. It is a serious concern.

If indeed it is true, what has been the turnover with regard to people being displaced, I suppose, permanent workers onto the casual list and that sort of thing? Is it just temporary? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, as we go through this transition period?

MR. PARSONS: Maybe Ralph can give a more detailed account on the numbers, but as far as the bumping goes that is not a process that we can control, that is totally dictated by the collective bargaining process. If we make an operational decision to close Pleasantville, the workers at Pleasantville or our youth councillors are part of a certain bargaining unit. They, based on seniority, can bump into Pleasantville. I know from the discussions we had - I actually met with a number of them - some people who were working in Pleasantville did not want to go to Whitbourne. There were people in Pleasantville who said: I do not want to get bumped out of here, I live here, I do not want to get bumped. Now I have to go down and bump in the School for the Deaf, for example.

That is a process that we cannot control, but we do try and we did have negotiations with the union representatives to try to accommodate everybody the best that we could. I know in a couple of circumstances we just could not accommodate everybody. There was one particular gentleman - I will not get into the details - who actually came into my office. I met with him, met with the head of the union and heard his case, making a final ditch appeal. We did the appeal and I disagreed with him in the final analysis and said: I am sorry, this cannot be done the way you want it done. You try to accommodate the best that you can.

Maybe Ralph would give you the particulars. I think fourteen was -

MR. ALCOCK: We had, at Pleasantville -

MADAM CHAIR: Excuse me, could you please state your name.

Mr. ALCOCK: Ralph Alcock.

At Pleasantville we had twenty-seven individuals in various capacities. Of those twenty-seven people, there were six or seven that either bumped or received separation packages. Of the remaining staff, they were all transferred out to Whitbourne. The staff in Whitbourne: There were some individuals in Whitbourne who were receiving full time hours. All of the individuals that were receiving full time hours, although they may have been casuals, have been accommodated at this particular point in time. The only individuals that may be effected are casuals who received less hours. These individuals are called in at any given time and they are not called in as much as they may have been in the past. If there is a downside, that is the only downside. All of the individuals who were receiving full time hours at Whitbourne have been accommodated.

MR. HEDDERSON: Thank you, Ralph.

Just one further to that. The future is another concern. Will there be another procedure? What do you expect when the RNC remand centre comes into effect?

MR. PARSONS: The RNC remand will not impact what we have at present, not at all. In fact, that is the finishing piece of the puzzle. That will not impact the numbers that happen at Whitbourne because the RNC remand is only intended and only can be used as an overnighter. You pick somebody up on the street tonight, you look after them tonight, until court tomorrow, and then they are off to Whitbourne. So that will not impact it at all.

Of course, down the road, again it will depend on numbers. Given the numbers we have seen in the last few days it is kind of hard (inaudible). Despite declining populations and crime rates and you think your numbers will be going down, we are going the opposite way. So it is kind of hard to judge from numbers. We will have to gauge it as we go and react appropriately.

MR. HEDDERSON: Just on the youth services again. With regard to the transition from the - and this deals with the young people that are incarcerated. I had a call the other day about an individual, who I will not mention, obviously, but the transition from that facility, especially back into the schools or even back into the communities in some cases, is a very difficult one for the youth. In many cases - again, I do not know how many cases, but it does happen, that they simply go back into the same environment from which they were taken.

Minister, with regard to that sort of transition, is your department a big part of that, as a lead in that particular transition, or is it put back into Health and Community Services or the education system or whatever? I am just more curious than anything, because I do see youth coming out of that facility, getting back into the same environment and, lo and behold, before too long they are back into the system again.

MR. PARSONS: In fact, we are involved. We are currently developing a reintegration program because we have acknowledged, we know that this has been an issue. It is difficult not only for the offender, but it is often difficult for the people with whom he gets reintegrated, he or she. So, it works both ways here.

So, what resources do we have in terms of - we have some social workers in the system, we have counsellors in the system, we have teachers in the system in Whitbourne. It is one thing to caretake them and look after them during their period of incarceration, but part of that process, we feel, should be preparing them to go back to their homes, to their communities, to their schools and, hopefully, not have this occur again. It is all part of the rehabilitation process.

Some of the resources that we have are not in Justice. It might, for example, be social workers connected with HRE or Health and Community Services or maybe counsellors tied into the Department of Education. So, that is the whole purpose of the program. It is no good today for us to play our role and then pop you home tomorrow in a taxi. Who knows you are coming, who know what your circumstances are and so on?

That is what this program is geared to. Yes, if the resources are there, we want to make sure we make the best use of them again, so that if a person can go back with a different attitude and into an environment that is accepting and nurturing, probably they will never become a resident of Whitbourne again.

MR. HEDDERSON: Okay.

Just one area: Of course, the buzz out lately has to be the Voisey's Bay pending deal. Certainly, I am quite aware that you and your department would be very much involved in looking at drafts and implications and that sort of thing. Basically, have the Justice lawyers provided any advice to government with respect to any draft agreement or proposal related to the guaranteeing of compensation, in one form or another, for ore that leaves the Province from Voisey's Bay and does not return?

MR. PARSONS: Let me just say, anything that is being done by Justice or by external counsel at this time, vis-à-via any negotiations for Voisey's Bay, is exactly that; negotiations being planned for advice to Cabinet and I certainly would not comment. It would not be appropriate for me to comment on anything. In fact, I do not think it would be in the best interests of this Province to comment. If we are negotiating, we are negotiating on behalf of the best interests of everybody in the Province. I do not think it is a good tactic for anybody to necessarily let the other side that you are negotiating with know how you might feel about a certain thing.

MR. HEDDERSON: Okay.

With that in mind then, are there any lawyers currently assigned to that file?

MR. PARSONS: Yes. Patterson, Palmer here in St. John's, a major law firm, has been involved in providing some advice to government for a number of months on the Voisey's Bay issue.

MR. HEDDERSON: So, no in-house. This is out of house?

MR. PARSONS: Oh no, that is out of house. They do have an in-house counsel that they liaison with so that the information can be put back through government. Sometimes the information takes place through that route. Their lawyer would advise the lawyer in Justice who would advise me. Sometimes it has been placed directly from the outside to me. Sometimes it is directly from the outside to the Premier; for example, if he wanted a particular piece of information. You have to realize at this time, legal is one thing, policy considerations are the other. Law firms have not been giving government, cannot give government, advice on the policy initiative.

You may run into a situation, for example: If we were to do this and pursue this course of action, what would we have to iron out in terms of transmission lines to the border? Who do we have to talk to? That could become a legal issue. For example, is it the Labrador Inuit Association that we have to talk to? So, the legal issue may become: What do we do if we need to talk transmission lines? What do we need to do if we need land settlement claims discussed? What do we need to do if we have to have discussions with Labrador Hydro? That is when we get into the legalities. The policy things, as to do you or do you not allow ore to be shipped out for a certain period of time - that is a policy thing - the lawyer would not tell you whether you do or do not do that. That is not the lawyer's call.

MR. HEDDERSON: Thank you, Minister and staff.

Madam Chair.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Mr. Hedderson.

The hon. the Member for Port de Grave.

MR. BUTLER: Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just have the one question and, to be honest with you, I will begin by saying that I know very little about the judicial system. So, forgive me if I am straying away here. I will admit right from the beginning that it has to do with the actual figures in your proposal. Seeing as we are into a wonderful form of question period here this morning, please forgive me if I ask one more question.

My question is - and I have to go about it this way. I have been dealing with people over the years now from the environmental end of it, Government Services and Lands, on issues regarding cleanups in the particular district that I represent. Why I am mentioning it here now - I know a judge, when he makes a ruling on any particular case, so be it, but I hear from the odd RCMP officer and law enforcement officers who look at environmental cleanups, when they say: Look, it is almost a waste of our time to do the paperwork because, when we go in, we are going in again fairly soon because the sentence is not heavy enough.

I am not saying they should take those people and lock them up, because then you are going to have more problems like you related to here this morning, but it seems like the fines are so low. I will not go into any names, but one instance that I know very well, I visited the site with an enforcement officer on three different occasions. They take the gentleman into the court and the judge will probably sentence him, give him a fine of $150. The guy walks away laughing because he is going to have that much made at this terrible site that he has as soon as he gets back home again.

I don't know if your department - how that works. Like I said, I plead ignorant to that fact. Is there such a thing that the fines can be increased, the judges can be advised to do that? I think it would clean up the mess out there quicker and probably be less costly in the long run.

MR. PARSONS: First of all, what fines can be imposed are decided by the Legislature that is responsible for that. For example, if it is a federal matter, the federal government, when they pass that law, they put in what the range of fines or sentences can be. If it is a provincial matter, the Province does the same thing. Once the fines are imposed, it is absolutely, completely, totally up to the judge, after hearing what the facts are, what his sentence is. The Province cannot, under any circumstances, due to the principle of judicial independence, tell a judge what a sentence should be, provided he is within the parameters of what he is legally allowed to do.

The Crown Counsel, for example, if the Crown were involved, can certainly make a recommendation, if they feel it is an environmental case that the Crown were involved in, the Crown Counsel can say: Well, Your Honour, My Lord, there are the parameters, these are the facts, and we think that instead of $300 it should be $5,000. That is the role of Crown Counsel, to analyze the facts and make a recommendation to the judge. Now, that recommendation is obviously not binding on a judge. It is his decision. Usually in every process there is an appeal process. A judge, for example, may say: I have looked at these facts. I have listened to what the Crown had to say. I listened to what the defense lawyer had to say, and I am going to give that $300 fine.

If we feel that the $300 fine is totally out of wack with what is being done for similar type offences in other jurisdictions, if we feel that the judge, in imposing $300, has totally ignored or not paid any attention to the facts, or there may be some very aggravating circumstances, for example, we can appeal. We go to another level of court and say: Look, we presented this case to this judge and instead of $5,000, which was fair, he gave three. We would ask you to review this and look at it again.

That is how it works, but we cannot tell the judge what to do. Provided he is acting within the parameters of - now, if you are not satisfied with the fine, we have had some cases, for example, where the range may be - under these circumstances, a judge may impose a penalty between $100 and $1,000. That may become a case where we, as a society, decide that this is crazy; maybe that is not the range we want any more. In that case we could decide, as a policy, that we want to change the range from $100 to $1,000, from $100 to $10,000, but then we come back to the Legislature to do that. There is usually a lag time between the law that you have - society is evolving all the time and as circumstances change the Legislatures catch up, generally, with society and societal needs and you amend your legislation to always try to reflect what is most current to you, so it is an ongoing process.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Mr. Butler.

The hon. the Member for Burin-Placentia West. Do you have any questions?

MS M. HODDER: Thank you.

I don't have any questions. Like Roland said earlier - I have probably an even more limited knowledge of the judicial system than he has, but I certainly appreciated the responses and enjoyed the responses here this morning. It was certainly informative and most interesting. I thank the members opposite for their questions and the minister for providing such informative and interesting responses. Again, I thank all members of the staff for being present this morning.

MR. PARSONS: Thank you.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Ms Hodder.

The hon. the Member for Humber East. Do you have any questions or comments?

MR. MERCER: Just a minor observation. This is the second set of committee meetings we have had so far this year. In my own mind, I am just trying to figure out whether it is Sandra Kelly or Kelvin Parsons who can take the longest time to answer a question. So far, I think Sandra is ahead on that one.

Just a question on legal aid. That is a bother for me because people of low income are the people who always use legal aid services. In the case of a martial breakup, or in the case of a custody battle, somehow, some way, legal aid seems to pick one client versus the other, the male or the female, and one person is at a disadvantage. I understand the rationale for that, but there has to be a way around that particular problem.

MR. PARSONS: First of all, the legal aid system, the funding alone that goes into it, has been - like a lot things the feds are involved in from a judicial point of view, they are backing off on it and not putting the bucks into it.

The process is needs based. I will use names to make it easier to follow, but if John and Jane go into a legal aid office, and there has been a marital breakdown and they want assistance, first of all, what they are making is relevant. If they are both employed teachers, for example, they are not going to qualify to start with. It depends on what your financial need is, whether you get it or not. If they both need lawyers, you do not normally get legal aid lawyers to do civil type stuff; for example, divorce matters. The principal expenditure for legal aid is for criminal matters, but if someone goes in, for example, to a courtroom and Jane is going to sue John for spousal support, or child support is a quite common one, and if she goes to the court, she does it on her own. There are people out there to help people with that. You do not need a lawyer now to do that. It is a pretty rote process. How much do you make? How much do you need? What does John make? Off to court, there are people there to help you get through the stream, appear in court, and a judge to have that information and make the order.

If you get to court and you find out that John is there with a lawyer, here is John who obviously found some way to come up with the money to get his lawyer because legal aid did not give him a lawyer either, then legal aid will appoint a lawyer to represent you in that circumstance because they will not see you in a courtroom with John with a lawyer and you being disadvantaged and not have one.

MR. MERCER: So you are saying legal aid will not provide legal aid unless it is a criminal matter?

MR. PARSONS: That is the principal focus of legal aid expenditures, as it goes to the provision of lawyers to criminal matters.

WITNESS: Certain civil areas.

MR. PARSONS: Certain civil areas, but a very small portion of the legal aid budget goes to civil matters. It is virtually all criminal.

MR. MERCER: I have been dealing with a couple of cases over the last year or so and people of low means, and whoever gets to the legal aid queue first usually gets legal aid and the other gentleman or other lady ends up borrowing, begging, stealing, or doing whatever they can to bring themselves up to the same level of defense.

MR. PARSONS: I would be concerned about that. I would like to know that, because the experience is just the opposite. The person goes through the system that exists - for example, getting assistance putting together your claim forms and so on - and you find out when you get to court that the other party has a lawyer, at that point, that is when legal aid steps in and says: Okay, we will not see you disadvantaged and not have a lawyer. If your husband is going to make a row over this and he has a lawyer, well, we won't see your disadvantaged. We thought you were on a par to get this resolved. Then legal aid would step in and pay the lawyer for the disadvantaged party because they do not have a lawyer.

MR. MERCER: Let me rephrase it in another way. Let's assume the case where legal aid would, in fact, be legitimate in a circumstance in a marital situation, and both of them approach legal aid for assistance. How do you decide which of the two get legal aid? That is the question.

MR. PARSONS: Based on the needs formula again. The husband, for example, may be a fully employed teacher who has an income, and the wife may be a homemaker, looking after three kids, who does not have any money.

MR. MERCER: If both of them were on social assistance?

MR. PARSONS: Again, if the dispute is over the children, they both get one.

MR. MERCER: Both would get legal aid?

MR. PARSONS: Yes. If you are going to appoint for one, you would not leave somebody disadvantaged, one with and one without, particularly if you are dealing with children. For example, if the custody is an issue and one wants custody and the other one wants custody and there is going to be a custody dispute, you would have to. The courts would demand it. The courts would not have you there before the Supreme Court arguing custody, one with and one without.

MR. MERCER: Perhaps we can discuss this at a later date because the situation I am referring to is one, not the other.

MR. PARSONS: Well, there must be some reason for it because the general rule is that the courts would demand it.

MR. MERCER: Thank you, Madam Chair.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Mr. Mercer.

I understand, Mr. Wiseman, you have one other final question.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Just as a follow-up to a couple I asked earlier, Minister. I asked a couple of questions with respect to use of the outside legal counsel and the other was the number of cases that were pending. You gave me the rationale for the criteria you use, and how you established that. I wonder, is it possible that you could provide us with the list of outside counsels being used in the last year, and the associated costs for that?

The second one was the issue around the - you commented that you had the large book, and you wish you had brought it. There are 300 claims outstanding. Is it possible to get a listing of those claims, and the associated costs or amounts?

MR. PARSONS: In that regard, whatever is appropriate to be released, no problem. You can certainly have the list. There may be some reason why we cannot divulge. Sometimes there is a court order, for example, that says - but anything that we have as to the list of who is suing government, not a problem. I will refer that to the director and he will see you get a list.

As to the external legal fees, I can give those to you now, if you would like.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Okay. The firms as well?

MR. PARSONS: Yes.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Okay.

MR. PARSONS: There are two lists here. If you would like me to go through, I will go through each of these. For what time period would you like them?

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: The last fiscal year, if you have them.

MR. PARSONS: For 2001-2002. This is on the civil side of stuff: Aylward, Chislett and Whitten, $8,635.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Is it a very long list?

MR. PARSONS: Yes, there are about forty different law firms in the Province.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: To save time, maybe it would be easier for you to provide a copy of it.

MR. PARSONS: Sure. I just want to show how balanced things are, as to how wide we search to make sure that things are done properly.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: Do you want to put it into the record?

MR. PARSONS: Yes.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: If you want to put it into the record, that is up to yourself. Rather than record it, I wouldn't mind - is it possible to get a copy of it?

MR. PARSONS: Yes.

Aylward, Chislett and Whitten, $8,635; Babb Sheppard, $1,126.50; Barry, Walsh & Associates, $2,977.50; Benson Myles, $14,318.60; Blackmore & Jenkins, $23,462.19; Browne, Fitzgerald, Morgan, $113,947.58; Bryan Blackmore - private solicitor - $1,494.20; Burke Robertson, $754.99; Curtis, Dawe, $15,587.44; David A. King Law Office, Corner Brook, $4,860.01; Donald Gallant, $30,152.04; Donald McRae, that is the Professor McRae, $55,184.36; Easton, Facey, of Gander, I believe, $9,347.32; Flavell, Kubrick, that is a firm on the mainland, $6,327.40; George Furey, $37,957; Goodland O'Flaherty, $402.58; Gowlings, that was Gowlings, Henderson in Toronto, $235,920.45; Graham Watton on the West Coast, $168,888.50; Jeffrey Keefe Law Offices, $671.24; Johnson & Buchan, $2,923.49; Kimberly Burridge, $356.25; King & Senior, $1,846.20; LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene and McRae, $170,924.91; MacBeath, Edwards, $7,144.80; Martin Whalen et al, $57,550; Mary O'Brien, $39,037.67; McInnes, Cooper, $48,256.70; Michael Drover Law Offices, $1,739.21; Miller & Hearn, $71,009.12; Mills & Gallant, $30,440.27; Mills, Hussey & Pittman, $2,441.02; Myles Weinberg, $58,208.11; O'Melveney Myers, I believe that is out of Alberta -

WITNESS: That is U.S.

MR. PARSONS: - the U.S., $13,634.25; Patterson Palmer, $44,547.39; Picco, White, Evans, on the Burin Peninsula, $341.27; Simmonds, Kennedy, O'Quinn, $34,255.98; Singleton, Urquhart, $88,210.60; Smith, Coffey, $55,027.50; Stagg, Marks & Parsons, $3,422.99; Stewart McKelvey, $9,671.76; Stikeman Elliott, $60,486.93; Susan L. Fisher Law Office, $337.47; Veva Moulton, $286.50; William M. Mercer $42,144.35; Woloshyn & Company $1,049.68.

There have also been payments to outside counsel on the inquiries. We have three inquiries on the go. We have the Reid Inquiry, the Power Inquiry, and we have -

WITNESS: The refinery.

MR. PARSONS: - the Refinery Inquiry. That is just getting started. Barry, Walsh & Associates, on the Power Inquiry, were paid $17,704; Benson, Myles, on the Power Inquiry, $2,430; Collins & Associates, on the Power Inquiry, $13,981; Dawe & Burke, on the Reid Inquiry, $18,276, and O'Dea, Earle, $98,765, for a total of $151,156 to inquiry counsel. That is to the end of February, this year.

There is also a list of criminal external payments for that period, April 1, 2001, to February, 2002: Barry, Walsh & Associates, $468.75; Benson, Myles $400; Browne, Fitzgerald, Morgan, Avis, $45,904.55; Hughes, Brannan, $189.04; Jeffrey Keefe, $343.25; Miller& Hearn, $120; Mills, Hussey & Pittman, $624; Province of New Brunswick $6,510.56. That is in regard to, we had an issue with our bilingual judge who was off the Bench and we had a bilingual trial and we had to bring in - in fact, we changed the legislation in the House in order to accommodate the New Brunswick judge coming in. That was $6,510.56. Perry, Harris, $105; Picco & White, $2,356.20; and Singleton & Company, $2,508; totalling $59,529.35.

That would be in areas, for example, if you had to get an outside counsel to look after some criminal matter because you do not have a Crown Counsel available. That does not include amounts that you would pay out, for example; sometimes you have a settlement and you pay outside counsel as part of the settlement. Like in the Gregory Parsons case, for example, there was $80,000 included in there for the firm of Williams, Roebothan. So you end up paying out to those sources as well. I will certainly provide you with these charts.

MR. ROSS WISEMAN: If you could, please, and a list of the claims (inaudible).

MR. PARSONS: And the claims, yes, not a problem.

MADAM CHAIR: Mr. Mercer.

MR. MERCER: Some of the costs you quoted there were very low: $100 or $200. I can't believe you could get any lawyer to do anything for that amount of money. What did they do?

MR. PARSONS: You may have a civil case on, for example, a trial in Gander, and you may ask someone to put in an appearance for you, just to get a new date. It may be something as simple as that. They take their time to go from their office to the court to stand in (inaudible) and get a new trail date for you.

MR. MERCER: Kind of walk into the court and walk out.

MR. PARSONS: And be there whatever time was required to have the judge deal with it.

MR. MERCER: It reminds me of the commercial on TV (inaudible)

MR. PARSONS: I trust you're not comparing him to the Maytag repairman.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Mr. Mercer.

Do you have one final question, Tom, before we go?

MR. HEDDERSON: Yes, just one final question and a comment to follow.

Minister, the Status of Women, I believe, have put out a paper, I think, Gender Matters. I was just wondering because just following from what Bob was saying with regard to legal aid, there is some concern about gender equity with regard to the legal aid. I know it is a fairly substantial paper. I don't know if it was presented to you or if you are aware of it, but my question, of course, is: What initiatives are your department taking to ensure that any inequities with regard to the socio-economic situation that people find themselves in, or gender, are you addressing that or is it an issue or whatever?

MR. PARSONS: We have had an ongoing dialogue with not only the provincial Status of Women's Group but also with various women's groups around the Province because they have different needs. Usually they get spearheaded up to the provincial group.

There were some concerns raised on one issue about the appointment of female judges. They felt that there should be one. That was raised when we appointed Mr. Harold Porter from our department to the Bench. I made it quite clear at that time to the president of the Newfoundland Women's Association, as well as I did to the public, that was done for a very specific reason. We cannot be here having New Brunswick judges coming in dispensing law in the Province of Newfoundland if we have bilingual people here in Newfoundland to do it. I, quite frankly, did not care what their gender was. The issue was, were they bilingual? Mr. Porter was bilingual. He had practiced before the Bar of Quebec. He was a long-standing member of our Bar. He was an Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions here. That was why that decision was made. I discussed that with the president of the association at length.

Since that, in fact, Lynn Spracklin, who has been a long-time member of the Bar here for thirty years or so, a ten-year deputy minister in this department, has gone to the Bench as recently as two weeks ago. So, we have addressed those types of issues that they brought up. There was also a Ms Condon of the Gander association who had serious concerns, and very legitimate concerns, because you often end, up when you get into a court situation, a lot of the issues involve women. They involve abused women, battered women, and children who end up in these situations as a result of it.

We have facilitated numerous discussions between the women's groups and the Legal Aid Commission, because there is a sensitivity that the Commission has to have when they are dealing with being able to provide counsel. It is not simply a dollars and cents factor as to whether you meet this criteria or not and whether you do or do not get a lawyer. So we, in fact, not only facilitated but sat in on several meetings between the women's groups and the Legal Aid Commission, which is headed up by Tim Chalker and Newman Petten being the executive director, to make sure those sensitivities are there to deal with women's issues. In fact, I was invited by the women's groups to one of their presentations on LeMarchant Road, and I insisted and took with me and personally carried the Chair of the Legal Aid Commission, and the executive director, with me to make sure that they were cognizant of the concerns and aware of the concerns.

MR. CUMMINGS: (Inaudible).

MR. PARSONS: That is a very good point. John Cummings, the deputy minister, just reminded me that we have launched what we are calling Project Central, which is being done in Gander region, which again is an initiative to make sure that women have access to counselling facilities, and that women understand how the legal aid system works. In fact, we have one going over in the Corner Brook region similar to that which was the forerunner. The initiation of it was in Corner Brook and Gander has now followed up on that.

Another involvement, shall we say, that we have had when it comes to women's issues have been shelter issues, particularly in Labrador. Ruth Flowers, from up in Labrador, and myself, have had extensive discussions because in Labrador you have a unique cultural concern, as well, when you talk about violence against women, even more so than you do have on the Island portion. There has been a lot of involvement with victims' service groups and women's groups in the Labrador region trying to - we are hoping now, with the help of everybody, to be able to get resources to put some kind of shelter up there which is desperately needed. That is what we are working towards. So, yes, there has been a lot of identification of the concerns, discussion of the concerns, and creation of ways to deal with it, and very positive responses to deal with it.

MR. HEDDERSON: Thank you, Minister.

Overall, first of all, I thank the minister and his staff for certainly taking me out of my ignorance, let me put it that way. A second thing, too, of course, as you are aware, the critic is not with us today, due to personal circumstances, and certainly passes along his regrets. The only thing is, I think he is reserving the right, perhaps, to bring up some things in the Budget Debate. Certainly, we hope that he will be able to do that.

Again, thank you, Madam Chair, for providing me with this opportunity.

MADAM CHAIR: Thank you, Mr. Hedderson.

If there are no other questions, I will ask the Clerk to call the heads, please.

CLERK: Subheads 1.1.01. to 4.2.02., inclusive.

On motion, subheads 1.1.01. through 4.2.02. carried.

On motion, Department of Justice, total heads, carried, without amendment.

MADAM CHAIR: I would like to certainly thank the Committee this morning for their informative questions to the minister and his department, and, most importantly, to thank you, Minister, for your very detailed and explicitly factual responses to the matters that have been raised here this morning, and certainly to thank all the officials within your department who, I am sure, have no small task in carrying out the Justice issues of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I thank you all this morning for your participation and we will probably see you all back here next year.

On motion, the Committee adjourned.