It’s an incredible honour for me to be able to stand in the House today and pay tribute to John Keith Riddell, who no one in the rest of Ontario knows as John Keith Riddell; it’s Jack Riddell. I never had the opportunity to meet Jack, but as you’ll see in my remarks, we owe him a lot.

He was an auctioneer, and proud of it. There’s one thing about a livestock auctioneer that you need to understand: They perform a transaction between the owner/the seller and the buyer, and at the end of that transaction, both parties have to feel well treated. It’s an incredible skill, and if the auctioneer doesn’t do that, slowly the auction will fail. That’s how it works. It’s an incredible skill, and that’s something that is transferrable to politics, that skill of being able to make a deal, because an auctioneer makes a deal every time the gavel falls. That’s an incredible skill, a skill that when I read through Jack’s bio—a skill that he had.

He served from 1973 to 1990, and became agriculture minister in 1985. As the minister said, he brought forward legislation like the protection of farm products act and the Farm Implements Act. He actually brought forward the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission; he revamped it.

But to truly understand the impact that Jack Riddell had on agriculture and on the province, you have to think back to the 1970s, because the 1970s were golden in farming. Prices were high; interest was manageable. My father ran the farm at that time, and we bought and we bought and we bought. Then the 1980s hit, and everything stopped. Interest went to 20%, and that’s when Jack Riddell became Minister of Agriculture. You cannot imagine—I don’t think any of us can imagine the pressure of that.

I was just starting then, and those were the days of your neighbours getting foreclosed. The feds stepped in to stop foreclosures. And penny auctions: Your neighbours would gather around and stop the auctioneer, stop other people from bidding, because the whole neighbourhood was falling apart.

One thing I noticed in reading about Jack Riddell: He said at a local meeting that we won’t be able to save all farmers. That took guts to say that. It did. But he was the spokesman within cabinet that brought forward, first, temporary interest relief; then, more permanent interest relief; and a transition program for farmers who had to transition out of agriculture, which is a nice way of saying “who lost their farms.” It was incredibly tough. That’s why I’m so honoured to be able to recognize that—so honoured.

On behalf of the official opposition, and I think on behalf of thousands of farm families, of farms that Jack Riddell saved, including ours—we sold half our land. I took over the farm. I got my interest capped at 13% for five years—13%—but we made it through. We made it through because of representatives like Jack Riddell.

Thank you very much. We all know that no one does this alone. It takes a family; it takes a community. Families give up so much for family members who help everyone else. We know how much you’ve given up, but we can’t, on behalf of farmers all over Canada, express our gratitude enough. Thank you very much.

It’s always an honour to be able to speak in the House and, today, speak for a whole hour on An Act to amend the Agricultural Research Institute of Ontario Act. One of the changes to this act is, instead of “institute,” it’s going to be Agricultural Research and Innovation Ontario. So be prepared for an hour on that slight change.

Interjections.

ARIO, as we know it, those in the agriculture community know it, is the owner of 16 agriculture research sites in the province. That’s really what its meat and potatoes are.

Agriculture is a big industry, and particularly agri-food is a big industry. Agriculture is a big part of it: the actual growing of the crops, the raising of the livestock. It’s dependent on research, and to do research, especially in agriculture, you need places to do it. I’m going to go through a list of a few of the things and what they do, just so you gain an appreciation. As I’m meandering through Ontario, I might stop at a few places that aren’t ARIO, but we’re going to do that.

We were just talking about a former agriculture minister, Jack Riddell. The first one on my list is the Ontario Aquaculture Research Centre in Alma. That was established when Jack Riddell was the Minister of Agriculture. It was also interesting for me, because I’ve been in agriculture my whole life and I didn’t know that all of these places existed. I’m going to be honest: This is a learning experience for me as well.

Alma is about aquaculture. It’s the fish research centre. I didn’t know that we had a fish research centre, and I certainly didn’t think it would be in Alma, but it’s in Alma. In Alma they have 10 buildings and 365 fish-rearing units for production and research of a full range of fish, from eggs to brood stock. The quarantine unit has successfully introduced Atlantic salmon, Arctic char and new strains of spring-spawning rainbow trout to the Ontario aquaculture industry. Since 1993, more than 170 research studies involving species have been conducted. Maybe everybody else knew this; I didn’t. It’s good that we all know it.

The next one—

Oh, I’m just getting started. In Arkell—Arkells is a band in Hamilton, right?

Interjection.

Then there’s—I’m sure everybody can guess what they study here—Bradford. I bet you the Minister of Colleges knows what they do at Bradford. They do research on vegetable crops. Who would have thought? Who would have thought they do research on that? But they do.

Cedar Springs: That’s 25 kilometres from Chatham. I’ve never been there, actually. I’ve been to Chatham, but not to Cedar Springs. There, 16 acres are used for crops, mainly apple orchards, but lately they’ve gone to hazelnut and ginger.

About 200 different crops are grown in Ontario. We hear that once in a while. It’s really important. In the agri-food sector, I believe there are close to 800,000 people working in it. It’s big. It’s one and two with cars, and you can’t eat cars. I wish that was my line, but it’s not.

Elora has got a few. There are some really big research stations in Elora: the beef station, the dairy; the swine was just opened. There’s also 400 acres of crops. I’ll give credit where credit is due: The current government has put a lot of funds into Elora, as have the commodity organizations. If you go to the beef or particularly the dairy—I know dairy; I’ve been in dairy my whole life—you’ll see some of the most modern facilities in the world at the Elora station.

I think generally the goal of research in years past has been to increase production, and that’s still the goal. But now there’s also a focus on minimizing impact to the climate, so minimizing your carbon footprint, protecting other resources: water, soil.

I didn’t have time in the tribute to our former minister, Minister Riddell, but actually his focus when he was minister—what he wanted his focus to be—was on foreign ownership of land, which is still a big deal, and soil erosion. But as often is the case in political life, those two issues kind of went—not by the wayside, but the focus on those two issues—when farmers were losing their farms to the banks, they weren’t as worried about soil erosion or foreign ownership.

Quite frankly, in Mr. Riddell’s time, he got lots of criticism. I think the current Tory government will feel for this. The former minister had lots of criticism because he opposed farmers selling pieces of their farms. We, on our farm—we had separate farms, but we had to sell pieces of our farm to keep the main one running. But if you had to sever a piece of your farm, he was opposed to that. That was, then, controversial, as it was very controversial when the current government put out a policy that they were going to allow three severances per farm lot. And guess what? They didn’t have to rescind that one. That one didn’t actually get fully to the light of day, I don’t think. But it’s a case where current events overtake the long-term goals of the industry.

So it’s safe to say that Elora, getting back to the—what are we talking about? Oh, ARIO—getting back to talking about that.

Interjections.

But the focus on Elora—I think it’s obvious that it’s livestock-focused. There was some controversy over Elora as well, because we used to have—and I’m going to get to it later—beef research in New Liskeard, and they moved the cows from New Liskeard to Elora—or moved the research. But if you really think about it, and especially the previous government, the current government talking about, “The future of the beef industry is in northern Ontario,” then you would think that the future of beef research would be in northern Ontario, because I’ll guarantee you that not everything that works in Elora works in my colleague’s riding of Kapuskasing. So that was a bit of a controversial move. There are some things that work. I’m not saying that you can’t do research, that all research has to be done where you want the industry, but some things make sense, so that’s still a bit of a head-scratcher that that was so centralized.

But I do believe that Beef Farmers of Ontario were in favour at the time, so I’m not criticizing them. They know more about raising beef than I do, so there could very well have been good reasons for that, but locally, we are still scratching our heads. You would think that beef research should be moving north as opposed to moving south—but that’s a whole different ball of wax.

There’s one, and I’ve been to this one; I bet you not too many other people have: Emo. We have a research station in Emo. That’s a long ways away from here. There’s a movie, I think, called Finding Nemo. I bet you more of you could find Nemo than find Emo.

Interjections.

Yes. I’ll tell you a little story about Emo. When I was on the board of Dairy Farmers of Ontario, we did the whole northern tour. There are eight committees, and we took a week and did them all. Myself and the fieldman stayed at a motel in Emo, a really nice place. This was a few years ago. We wanted to upload something or download something, so I went down to the front desk to see if we could hook up to the Internet. They looked at me and said, “Well, if you want to make a long-distance phone call, let us know.” They had no clue what we were talking about regarding Internet. But the sad thing is—and I’m taking the government at its word, that by the end of 2025, everybody will have Internet; I sure hope that’s the case, because it sure isn’t the case now. It really isn’t.

When we talk about agriculture research, you need stable Internet. So if you’re going to run—the Minister of Mines has a few robotic barns, one for sure, and one in mine. But for robotic dairy barns, you need stable Internet, not just satellite Internet that cuts out once in a while when one too many people hook on. That’s not what we need. And I’m not sure that that’s going to be able to be the case by the end of 2025, because if all we get is satellite, there are still going to be all kinds of places in the province that aren’t going to support the modern types of agriculture that we all know are what we need. It’s really important. I can’t stress that enough. We talk about it, and I don’t think any of us disagree. We all need it, and we all know we need it. That’s not a point of disagreement; it really isn’t.

Just as an example, there’s the interactive map where you can see where the projects are going in your riding. So I look at my riding and I have, where I live outside the town—I don’t know the term, but anyway, I can see the tower from my house, and that’s the kind of Internet I have. It works great. We also have a bit of a hunt camp where we would like to work a lot more, but there’s no Internet there. So now, on the infrastructure map, they’re putting fibre optic cable to my house, where I already have Internet, but to that lake where the hunt camp is, where there are many people who live full-time, there’s no project on the docket. What they’re going to get is satellite, likely. And I’m not dissing satellite. I’m not dissing anything, but it has its limitations. If that’s what’s promised, that’s not what people think they’re going to get. So if at the end of 2025, “Hey, discount on Starlink”—everybody is ready, and that’s not exactly what was promised—it wasn’t—and the deadline is coming very quickly. It’s 2024 now, and this is all supposed to be done by 2025.

One of the issues with the way the internet program was rolled out, and this is pertinent to a lot of things: By dividing Ontario up into 40—I think it’s 40—and then saying, “Okay, so you have to bid on the whole region,” what you’re doing is eliminating a lot of the small players who are actually the ones who were trying to provide the service in the first place. I believe Bell won our region, but Bell had no interest in providing it in the first place, so now the locals who were trying to get it from Bell, to get it from their trunk lines—now Bell is directly competing with them with subsidized dollars.

I got a call from my local recycling guy. He has got a good little business. He recycles. Lo and behold, the government is changing how recycling is done in Ontario. That’s great, but they’re doing the same thing. He has to bid on a region bigger than he can ever service. What does that do? That eliminates the little guy and puts the big guy in control.

This government believes that the big private sector guy, the big private sector companies, can do things more efficiently, and all that happens is the big private sector bids on those contracts and then they take their cut, and they still farm them out to the people who are actually doing the work, over and over again.

I can remember—this was before this government took power—the same thing happened with school buses. They made the areas for school buses much bigger, so you no longer could bid on three bus routes in your local town; you had to bid on half a district, and that shut out all the little school bus companies, every one. Now we’ve got three or four big school bus companies, and a lot of school bus runs can’t find drivers. That’s part of the problem, because they’ve totally lost the local touch. This government has done this on steroids. Every time, it’s bigger, bigger, bigger.

I took a little bit of a detour there by Emo. The next one is Huron, and Huron is just north of Centralia, with 125 acres of crops. For research, it focuses on weed control. Good.

I know quite a bit about the next one, New Liskeard. It’s not quite my hometown; I farmed just a little bit north of New Liskeard. The experimental farm in New Liskeard used to have dairy, used to have beef and had crops. Now it focuses mainly on crops, rightfully so.

There is a bit of a backstory, though, to the experimental farm in New Liskeard. This is how politics are supposed to work, and I give credit where credit is due. We heard a rumour that the University of Guelph, when I first got elected, wanted to get out of New Liskeard and do all the research at Guelph, kind of à la beef cow, and shut New Liskeard down. The local community heard this, and at the time it was a Liberal government. The Minister of Agriculture was Minister McMeekin, and we arranged—our office, the office of an opposition member—a tour of that centre for the minister. We got all of the players in agriculture, the 20 movers and shakers in New Liskeard, and we organized a dinner.

We came to an agreement to put a hold on that for two years, while local people could come up with some kind of accommodation to keep ag research in New Liskeard. That deal was the reason that the Northern Ontario Farm Innovation Alliance was created, and it’s still a body that has a big impact across the north. During those two years, people realized how big the future was in agriculture in northern Ontario, and it became more of a focus.

But we did cut a deal. They sold part of the experimental farm and built a new crop research station across the road, one that was more modern. But that was the way we moved forward, and that’s something that I’m pretty proud of. I’ve said many times to the minister, there hasn’t been an official opening yet of that centre. I’ve told the minister this, if and when the minister comes to Timiskaming, we will treat her as a minister of the crown should be treated, with respect, and we sincerely hope that I’m invited to that—and it wasn’t me; it was our community.

But there’s one more step that needs to be taken—well, there are a few more steps, but one more that needs to be taken as soon as possible, on the part of the agriculture station that was sold, there is something called the SPUD unit. The SPUD unit does work with potatoes, garlic and strawberries, and what the SPUD unit does is they take the seeds—potato seeds and whatever seeds—and they break them down so there are no viruses on those seeds. Then they reintroduce those seeds back into the commercial market.

There was something that went through PEI—I believe potato wart, potato scab or something. It’s to stop things like that. The reason that it was built in New Liskeard 40 years ago is because of the way the climate works, and the jet stream, and all the viruses and stuff. You southern guys have all the viruses; we’re nice and clean where we are. But it’s 40 years old. It’s worn out, and they’re spending a lot of time and effort just keeping the lights on. Everyone agrees: the potato growers, the garlic growers—all the people use it. What we need to do is move it across the highway—move a new SPUD unit across the highway next to the new ag research station, where it can keep doing its job for Ontarians for the next 40 years. Talking about this bill gives me a chance to talk about that.

While I’m talking about highways: Highways are important for moving agricultural products and moving a lot of stuff. My colleagues from northern Ontario and the people of northern Ontario will know that we spend a lot of time talking about highway safety. The member from Mushkegowuk–James Bay is putting forward legislation—I believe it’s Toby’s Law—to make it illegal to pass on a double line. It’s great legislation. Every chance we get, we talk about highways in this House. Today I’m talking about highways’ importance to agriculture, but highways in general.

On February 1 and 2, the Ministry of Transportation, the Kirkland Lake police detachment and the detachment in New Liskeard and Temiskaming Shores held a highway blitz of commercial vehicles. They pulled over 75 commercial vehicles that they did a full inspection on. Thirty-six of the 75 were pulled off the road for safety infractions—36 of 75. I’d like to thank the OPP and the MTO for that blitz, I really would, because everybody noticed, everybody was happy. But my question to the House, my question to the Minister of Transportation is, what about the other 363 days? If in those two days half the commercial trucks that were inspected were taken off the road for safety infractions—half—there’s a problem.

There is a problem. The member from Mushkegowuk–James Bay is heckling his own member, Speaker, but he brings up a very, very good point. It very well may be that Ontario might statistically have the safest roads in North America, but I can guarantee you that Highway 11 north of North Bay is absolutely not the safest road in North America.

So while the food that feeds people—while we transport it across that strip, and the highway is continually closed, it’s a big issue. Health care—the lack of health care, access to health care—is the number one issue in my riding but followed very closely by highway safety. I can tell you, Speaker, that when the OPP put up that post—that info doesn’t come from me; that comes from the northeastern OPP, that almost half the trucks pulled over had to be kept off the road—that didn’t make the residents of northern Ontario feel a lot better, because that’s our main street. That’s our main street.

Before I go to the next research station—we’re almost halfway down the list—I’d just like to—one other statistic about Highway 11. If your car is registered in the district of Timiskaming, so where the New Liskeard Agricultural Research Station is, you are four times as likely to die in an accident on a provincial highway than if it’s registered in Toronto—four times as likely to die, and yet we have to listen to “We have the safest highways in North America.” Again, I give credit where credit’s due. I see that MTO or someone is doing some testing along some of our worst corners because they’re planning on putting in a 2+1. I give credit where credit’s due. The 2+1 is a pilot project that hopefully will make a difference, and if it makes a difference on those 14 kilometres, hopefully they keep going.

But you know what else would make a difference on Highway 11—a big difference—and not just to the people driving regular vehicles, but to truckers? Places to pull off the highway. Like, there’s signs on Highway 11: “Fatigue kills.” But if you’re driving a truck and you’re fatigued, there’s no place to pull off, so what good is the sign? What good is the sign?

We’ve had a terrible year, winter-wise. I think anybody from northern Ontario—it’s been a really weird—

Interjection.

Highway 11: You can’t just pull over on a nice paved shoulder, because there isn’t one. You pull a truck over on Highway 11, and unless you stay on the highway, you’re not getting back on the highway. Everybody knows this, and we all laugh at the people who don’t know this and end up flipping over into the ditch—and this happens a lot. But it’s not wholly that. We need better training for drivers in Ontario or drivers across Canada, no doubt, but we also need better roads.

There are big chunks of Highway 11 that were designed 50, 60 years ago, and there hasn’t really been a big change. They changed the pavement, changed the culverts, but you look at the traffic—I drive around here a lot lately, and there are lots of country roads I drive here, country highways, nice roads. They’re basically as good as Highway 11 except they don’t have 1,800 transports a day. That’s the difference. And it’s just so frustrating. The government has promised, oh, for years, so maybe this is year they actually build rest stops or even parking lots, just a place to pull over.

There are big chunks that—my favourite, and this isn’t in my riding. It might be in the member from Mushkegowuk–James Bay’s. But anyway, when you go from Cochrane and you go west, there’s a big sign. I did this a couple of years ago, so maybe it’s changed now. There’s a big sign that if you need towing, here’s the number you have to call, but there’s no cell service on either side of that sign for a long ways. So again, it’s kind of like “Fatigue Kills,” right?

Now, I think it’s just because—there’s a lot of problems down here. I’m not saying—but it’s the Trans-Canada Highway. It’s the Trans-Canada Highway, and I think we all know that it’s substandard, but we don’t see it every day. But we do; we do. I had an MTO enforcement officer call me. He was talking about the blitz, what they did, and he goes, “Yeah, I spend most of my time in southern Ontario, but when we went on that blitz, you wouldn’t believe the things that happen on Highway 11 north of North Bay.” I said, “Oh, no, we believe, because we live it.” We live it. And that’s something that has to change and something that I’ve been talking about for the last 12 years. Maybe that blitz came because we bothered the minister enough, and that’s what we’re going to keep doing on behalf of the people of Ontario.

Before I go from New Liskeard to—where’s the next one on my list? Oh, Ponsonby. I haven’t even heard of Ponsonby before, but we’re going to talk about Ponsonby. But before I go to Ponsonby, I just want to talk about climate change for a second, because climate change has a lot to do with agriculture. I’m finding this winter has a big impact on all kinds of people, short-term—basically, now we’re having a bit of a winter, but usually our winter starts a lot sooner. There are a lot of people who rely on winter for their livelihood: skidooers, the people who run restaurants, servicing, the people who rent out cabins for skidooers. I have a lot of them in my riding. There was one—I stopped at their place a couple of days ago—the Tomiko restaurant on Highway 11. They put out an urgent call on Facebook: Could people help them out? Because they were just about done.

I stopped in at Temagami Shores. Tomiko has great food. Temagami Shores—great food, great rooms.

Man, it hurts when you don’t have a winter, right? We have to realize those things. I don’t know how we’re going to address that, but changes in climate—and whether you agree on how it’s happening or how quickly it’s happening, it’s happening. If you want to debate me on whether climate change is real, man, I think we’ve got to back up a few steps. But it’s impacting a lot of people, and we’re going to have to come to some kind of—on how we deal with people who are losing their livelihoods through no fault of their own.

It used to be, if you bought a business or you ran a business in northern Ontario, every year is different, but you could kind of depend on winter. The one thing about living in northern Ontario: You can kind of depend on winter. That’s no longer the case.

I was talking to the owner of Canadian Tire in Cochrane. He moved, I believe, from the Woodstock area. I don’t know exactly if it was Canadian Tire in Woodstock, but he moved to Cochrane. When I was kid, we came from the Woodstock area too. And I asked him, “Enlighten me. Why did you pick Cochrane?” There’s a pretty stringent system for Canadian Tires. You just can’t show up. You have to prove your management capability. So I said, “So, why did you move to Cochrane?” And his answer: “Because Cochrane has four seasons. If you stock up on snow shovels in Cochrane, you know you’re going to sell them.” I never really thought about that before. If you have a snowmobile sales shop in Cochrane, you’re pretty sure: “Well, this year, they’ve got snow,” but it’s nip and tuck. That’s not just, “It happens once in a while.” This has never really happened to us at this level. I’m not trying to be the Chicken Little person, but this has never really happened to us at this level.

And I was thinking, too, as someone in agriculture, we haven’t had really the cold weather either in northern Ontario that protects us from a lot of the insects and bugs, right? So, do you know what? The pine beetle might be coming to northern Ontario a lot quicker than we thought, because before, we were protected by cold weather.

So, now, I’m going to get back to ARIO. Ponsonby is a general animal facility, but it specifies—no. Focuses—we’ll use “focuses.”

Specializes—that’s the word I’m looking for. I’m using up so much of my own air in here that—no, anyway.

Okay. They specialize in—they have a unique flock of sheep: a pathogen-free flock of sheep. And that’s really important, because the sheep—okay. We already talked about the horses.

Interjection.

Anyway, I’m going to quote him. He has got a beautiful farm. I think his son runs most of it now, but it’s a very well-run farm, very progressive. He also has sheep. We were touring through the barns—and I know nothing about sheep. I know a lot about cows; I know nothing about sheep. There was one sheep in the corner away from the rest of the flock, and I said, “Craig, I think you’ve got a sick sheep.” He said, “No, there’s no such thing as a sick sheep. There’s either a healthy sheep or a dead sheep. There’s no such thing.”

With cattle, if you get cattle that are big enough, substantial enough, if they get something and if you help them, they can work their way through it; sheep, not so much. Sheep are small. That’s why it’s really important to have a pathogen-free flock: because if a sheep disease hits, you need to be able to test what the sick sheep have that the clean sheep don’t. It’s much more scientific than this, but that’s why it’s important to have a pathogen-free flock of sheep.

Yes, I learned something that day, too. I learn something almost every day. I don’t use it that often, but I learn it.

Anyway, Ridgetown: Almost everybody knows Ridgetown. There’s also an ag college there. A lot of people go to the Ridgetown ag college. It’s pest research and soil management.

Simcoe is fruit and vegetables. Vineland is what everybody thinks: It’s orchards, vineyards, greenhouses and mushroom production.

I’m almost running out of time. Can you believe that?

Winchester is specifically for eastern Ontario crop producers, because, again, in different climatic conditions, you use different methods. As an example—and some people aren’t going to like this; some farmers might not like this—there are different ways of tillage for crops. Most of us have been to the IPM, the International Plowing Match, where they plow. There are very few farmers that actually plow anymore, right?

Some farmers use minimum till, so they use a machine with tines that disturbs the soil, and then when they plant, they use another machine to make it flat and then they plant. Some farmers use no-till. For no-till, you don’t disturb the soil at all. You use a different seeding machine and it goes right into there. No-till is beneficial because it’s really good for erosion, because you don’t disturb. It’s good for animals in the soil, the worms and stuff.

But it has been our experience that in northern Ontario, I think because our season is shorter, if you do minimum till—the ground is darker; there’s nothing covering the ground, so it warms up much quicker in the spring, so we do it. We minimum till to warm the soil up. You do some tillage in the fall to rough up the soil, so in the springtime, when the sun hits it—there are people who do no-till successfully in northern Ontario, but most don’t. So that’s an example of how a different tillage system might work fantastically in Ridgetown, and you bring it to Cochrane and it might not.

I’d like to quote someone—he departed. His name is Rod Inglis. His grandson still runs a tile drainage business in the New Liskeard area, and Rod Inglis brought tile drainage to our area.

My dad tiled his first farm with Rod in 1971. Rod was a great guy. At a public meeting—and when he brought tile drainage to northern Ontario, a lot of people didn’t believe in tile drainage because we thought that tiles, or my predecessors thought the tiles would freeze out of the ground. No, because at our place, we can’t have frost go deeper than tiles. Two feet of frost is not a big deal, right? So it took a while. But anyway, at a public meeting, someone asked—when he was bringing people in northern Ontario, someone asked, “So what exactly can you grow in northern Ontario?” And this still holds true. He got up and he said, “You can grow anything in northern Ontario. Harvesting, that might be a different story”—and that’s still the case.

Getting back to research, why research, why New Liskeard is so important, why Emo is so important is, if you want it, research has to be, especially crop research, site-specific. One of the things about research is that farmers do a lot of research themselves. It’s mostly through trial and error. Most farm research is, “Okay, we’ll try to do this,” and the next year you go, “No, we’re not doing that again.” That’s why you need actually organized research, and not just research but—again, I’m not dissing anybody, but research done solely by input, companies that sell input, is always going to favour input.

When we were paying tribute to Mr. Riddell, in the tributes, his father was an extension agent, an ag rep, and he was an assistant ag rep. We don’t have ag reps anymore, but we should, because something that ag reps did that’s really important—I can remember when the extension agent came to our farm. Because they see so much, they provide unbiased—have you tried this or have you—and again, I am not dissing any company, but when you get an extension agent who comes from a company, their advice could be very good, but it’s not always unbiased, and it shouldn’t be. If you’re getting paid by the company to go visit farmers, you’re not going to say, “Well, no, you shouldn’t use our product because you don’t really need our product. You should use X.” But extension agents were very good for that.

Specifically, as we talk about agriculture in northern Ontario, that would be something very important to think about: Who provides the research? Because some of the things I see that are happening in the new agricultural areas in Ontario are some of the things—we’re repeating the same mistakes we made before.

So again, I’m going to go back to Minister Riddell, who was very focused on soil erosion. Soil erosion is a huge issue. Where soil erosion becomes an even bigger issue is with tile drainage. Tile drainage, if you put systematic tile drains in your field—necessary in northern Ontario. You can’t farm without it, just can’t farm without it.

Most of northern Ontario is sitting on 100 feet of clay. On my farm, there’s 100 feet of clay and then you get bedrock. If you don’t tile—if it’s not tiled—it doesn’t drain, right? Clay doesn’t drain, and we face this in Timiskaming. So you have 200,000 acres in Timiskaming on the Ontario side and 200,000 on the Quebec side of clay that doesn’t drain. It originally had trees on it, and the rain falls—and the rain doesn’t really go anywhere. It takes a long time for it to get to the lakes, right?

You take all the trees off, clear all the land, put drains in and dump all that water into a few gully systems that run to the lake. So that water that used to take a month, two months, to get to the lake at a slow speed now gets there in three days—with pipes this big or this big. If you don’t have measures in place to make sure that that doesn’t erode, you are going to have massive erosion problems—massive. We’ve had them in Timiskaming. We didn’t know about it. Honestly, we didn’t know better. But we do know better now. But I’m not seeing any better responses. It’s an issue.

I have townships in my riding, two or three—I’m going to get this trouble for this—not family farms, but big corporate farms, basically, people who invest in land for agriculture, control the township. There are huge drainage problems and they’re fighting the township to fix them, and there’s not really any funding to fix that. But there are huge areas farther north that are being cleared, are being tiled, and we’re going to run into exactly the same problem.

And it’s understandable. When I was a farmer—I’m still a farmer, but when I farmed full time to make a living, it cost a lot of money to tile drain. I’d like to commend the government. In northern Ontario, the heritage fund has a program to make it a bit more affordable. I did a lot of work before I was elected MPP to get that program going in northern Ontario. It costs a lot of money to tile your farm. But it also costs a lot of money to protect the outlets. There is a municipal drainage program to help protect the outlets, but often in unorganized territory, they don’t get protected, and it causes huge issues, and it shouldn’t have to. We should be able to make the changes so that we know when we get too close to water courses. We used to, if there was a gully in the way, just bulldoze the gully, and then we wondered why we had erosion problems. Now we know these things. And that’s why there needs to be site-specific research, even on something as proven as tile drainage—something that could work with tile drainage and we haven’t really ever thought about.

Right now, in northern Ontario—I always talk about northern Ontario; it’s something I know. This probably applies to other parts of the world and other parts of southern Ontario. All tile drainage does in northern Ontario, where we are, is it lowers the water table. So you put the tiles in the ground two feet below and the water table no longer goes up. And it takes some of the rain, but it’s mostly the water table.

What happens if it gets too dry? That might happen, right? Weather is weird. We could be doing research to see if we could plug up the tiles, if we could regulate the tiles to actually irrigate it if we ever needed to. Now, farmers themselves don’t have the money to do that, to figure out if that’s going to work. Neither does a tile drainage operator, but that’s something that could be done at a research station in northern Ontario, in the riding of Mushkegowuk–James Bay.

It’s stuff like that, if you’re serious about—we are losing agriculture land every day. We are. We can argue about how much we’re losing, how little we’re losing, but we are. Every time I drive down here, I see a building on something that used to be a field. I’m not anti-development. I’m not saying you can’t—no, I’m not anti-development. But we need to make sure we do it correctly—to develop agricultural land.

We also have to realize that no matter how great a job we do at farming in northern Ontario—I’m proud of this: I have some of the best farmland in northern Ontario, and around Earlton. I don’t think anybody would disagree, because a lot of people want to buy it. I’m really proud of that piece of land. But if somebody said that I could trade that land for half as much land in Oxford county, the smart money would go to Oxford county, because we’re never going to grow in Timiskaming what you can grow in Oxford county, ever, and anybody who tells you that we are is wrong.

I think eventually the government is going to say, “Oh, no, we’re not losing land; we’re gaining, because we’re clearing twice as much as is being paved over.” You’re still losing productivity, and we have to realize that. For every tillable acre of class 1 land, the goal of that should be—and I’ve put this forward in the Legislature, and I’ll put it forward again: It should go through an agricultural impact assessment. And for every tillable acre, the best use is to grow food. If there’s a better use—and there might be. A vegetable sorting facility in the Holland Marsh might be a better use of those acres of agricultural land, because it services the rest of the area, right? A beef processing facility in Bruce county: You can make a pretty good argument for that. But highways and houses? You can make the argument, but you have to show that that’s a better use than actually growing food—because in this, we are given a gift, and that gift is going to become more and more precious as the world becomes more and more unstable.

I’ve got one minute left to talk about Woodstock. That’s the last of my tour of ARIO. I was born in Ingersoll, so I know a little bit about Woodstock. My uncle Mr. Hardeman has been the MPP for Oxford county for a long time. Woodstock is where they have the outdoor farm show. That’s actually where the research station is in Woodstock. Woodstock is a great place to farm. Oxford county has also been one of the hardest places to get a severance, because they know how great a place it is to farm. Does that mean there’s no development in Woodstock? Absolutely not. There’s all kinds of development in Woodstock, in Oxford county, but they’re very selective, and that’s what we need to be. Whenever I hear the government say we need less rules—we need responsible rules, because without responsible rules, we’re going to end up slowing everything down.

Thank you very much, Speaker, for allowing me to ramble for this hour.

Scary as that sounds, in this particular bill—we are in favour.

So an hour on a name change is quite a bit, and there’s a few other things changed, but I haven’t heard anything back from the agriculture organizations. But this is an example where you take a piece of legislation by itself and it goes before on its merits, whereas a lot of other bills have good things and bad things and then we focus on the bad things—and they’re usually terrible things—and then you have a couple of good things and you focus on those, and that’s the difference. This is a reasonable piece of legislation that actually won’t take long to get through the House—thank you.

We’re not opposed to, when the highway is not safe, that it should be closed. But we need to have adequate highways, adequate training on those highways—that they’re not stopped needlessly. It’s the Trans-Canada Highway. Each time that highway is stopped, our families are in danger, but—

There’s medium-term things we can do to fix the roads, and we need a long-term strategy to—okay, is this the Trans-Canada Highway or not? And are we actually going to invest in it like it’s the Trans-Canada Highway, that it’s not the only two-lane goat path in Canada? Everywhere else is four-lane, and we’ve got a two-lane goat path. We have to realize, at some point: Is it or is it not?

When northern Ontario heard that the government was uploading the Gardiner and uploading the Don Valley, you know what? We thought, “Great. They’re not really Toronto roads.” And they seem to have no problem spending—they’re going to spend billions. So why don’t they spend money on the Trans-Canada Highway, the highway that they already control?