I listened intently to the remarks from the minister and from the parliamentary assistant.

We are largely in favour of this bill. It lays out ground rules for the regulation of veterinarians and regulation of vet techs—very important. But there’s—and this is a legitimate question—a carve-out for chiropractors. I didn’t hear it in the remarks, so I’d like if we could have an explanation of why there’s a carve-out for chiropractors, which seems to be a human designation as opposed to a veterinary animal designation.

I’d like to start off my remarks by perhaps ruining the suspense and saying that we will be in favour of this bill, not only for some of the measures that are included, but for the way the bill itself has been presented and—I said this in committee on other legislation—the fact that this has had extensive consultation among all stakeholders. We also consulted the stakeholders, and not everyone agrees with everything, but everyone who was interested got to have their input, and that’s really important; I give credit where credit is due and criticism where criticism is due. This has not always occurred in some of the other bills that this government has presented, and as a result, some of those bills have had to be rescinded. We are in favour of the content of the bill, but just the way it’s done—this is the way, when you’re developing legislation, that it should be done: Talk to the stakeholders, bring forward a comprehensive bill on one core issue or related issues. I’m not trying to make a pun here: There’s no poison pill in this vet bill, and that’s important.

Regardless of where we sit in this House, we are all here for the same reason: to make better legislation, to modernize legislation, to create new legislation. We are all parts of the partisan political process, but at the end of the day, we all have the same goal.

I believe that this bill is an example. I just want to repeat myself that this bill is an example, and I give credit to the minister and parliamentary assistant and their staff and to all the people who took the time to consult on the way this bill was presented. There might be changes needed in the future. We are all human; no one is perfect, and no piece of legislation is perfect either.

This is a very important piece of legislation. When you’re talking about veterinary medicine and the people who take care of our animals and our companion animals, our service animals and agricultural livestock—and actually, some of us have experience with all three. It’s hard to describe, but there’s a difference. Everyone here knows, but maybe some people don’t know—if there’s anybody watching this—that I’m a farmer by trade, a dairy farmer for 35 years. So we had livestock, and we had a very close relationship with our vets. But we also have pets and had a different relationship with the vet with pets.

I’m going to be fairly—“blunt” is the wrong word, but realistic. Often, a farmer has a different relationship with an animal than a pet owner. For a time, my wife—we took over a service dog that was—someone with a wheelchair had a dog; it wasn’t really a service dog. The dog was very well trained, but the dog became too much to handle. From that experience, we learned that someone who has a service animal has an incredibly different relationship than just a pet—not “just” a pet—or livestock. It was totally different—a dependence. To truly understand the impact that veterinary medicine has on everyone’s lives, particularly on people who practise it and the people who work with animals, but on everyone’s lives, you have to understand that.

It is incredibly hard to become a vet. Incredibly hard, and some would say perhaps too hard. Again, I’m being really—for many years, we haven’t—and I give credit where credit is due: There are going to be now more seats to teach vets. I think we need more, but we have started. The bar is incredibly high to be a vet, and it needs to be. It’s an incredibly skilled job.

But the bar, it doesn’t need to be lowered. This isn’t in this bill; I just want to say this. It doesn’t necessarily need to be lowered, but it needs to be shifted perhaps a bit, because it’s not just—and particularly for rural vets, livestock vets; actually, most rural areas are underserviced, because when you have a lot of rural, you don’t have a lot of houses. You have less people, and there’s a reason.

But the practice of being a vet or a vet tech—and I’ll get to them this afternoon. There’s much different treating an animal in a veterinary clinic in a city or a town than there is calving a cow at 25 below, 20 miles outside of town. That’s a reality. That’s something that, unless you’ve grown up or been exposed to that—a lot of people who are incredible vets look at doing that and, quite frankly, they pick small animal—

It’s the End the Public Funding of Partisan Government Advertising Act, 2024. I will read the explanatory note.

The Building Ontario Up Act, 2015, made numerous amendments to the Government Advertising Act, 2004. Among amendments made were changes to the rules that apply when the Auditor General reviews government advertising. The bill amends the act to reverse those amendments, so that the act reads substantially as it did before the 2015 amendments.

Mr. Yakabuski moved first reading of the following bill:

Bill 177, An Act to proclaim Test Your Smoke Alarm Day / Projet de loi 177, Loi proclamant la Journée du test des avertisseurs de fumée.

No.

I’m trying to find a way to say this. I said it this morning: Veterinarians play a key role not only with companion animals, with service animals—the minister herself mentioned service animals this morning, and that was a good thing to talk about—and livestock and exotic animals. There are exotic animals in the province as well. But the relationship between the vet and the animal and the caretaker or the owner is different with the different types of animals. Anyone who owns an animal wants to take care of it, has not only a respect for it but certainly a love, in many cases. But the relationship between a companion animal and an animal that’s farm livestock and a vet and the owner is different. I know that because our families had both for many years.

The working conditions for veterinarians and vet techs are also different in many cases for livestock and for small animals, companion animals. I think that’s one of the reasons that we are facing in this province a shortage of veterinarians across the board, but that shortage is more pronounced in rural Ontario and even more pronounced in northern Ontario. And that can have grave consequences.

Now, this act itself does not address that, but I think to have a good conversation about veterinary medicine in the province, you need to think about that. This act basically sets out the parameters of how veterinarians and vet techs are to be regulated, to make sure that they perform at a certain quality level, that they have an administration body to ensure that their members perform at a certain quality level. That’s very important. It’s important in all jobs but certainly when you’re dealing with living things, it’s incredibly important. That’s basically what this act does. It helps the animals that are in the care of the veterinarians—it improves their care.

But if you’re going to talk about improving the care of any type of animal in the province, you will also have to think about how there need to be enough vets, because lack of access to a veterinarian or a vet technician also impacts the health of the animal, as it does with our current human health care system. We have a lack of doctors. There are 22.2 million people in Ontario who don’t have access to a primary care doctor—

Yes, 2.2 million.

I’m not trying to compare the two directly, but I know, on our farm—I like talking about farming; it’s one of the few things I have a lot of experience in—we had a very good relationship with several vets. Over my 35-year career, that relationship changed. When I started farming, vets were mainly ER vets. If there was a bad calving, if there was something we couldn’t handle ourselves, we called the vet. But as my farm, and I think as agriculture progressed—but I’m using my farm as an example, a dairy farm—as we got better at our craft and as our animals started producing more, we started using the vets a lot more in a consultative and preventative medicine role.

Once, on our farm, we milked 70 cows, which is a normal-sized dairy farm—it’s a little bit below average; right now I think it’s a little bit higher, but we had 140 animals altogether—we got the vet once a month on a regularly scheduled visit simply to do herd health. That took half a day a month, to check the cows: the ones that should be in calf, the ones that needed a postpartum check, to make sure their vaccines were up to date, check the growth curves on the calves, check the feed formulations. On modern farms, the feed, what we feed cattle—and that goes for all livestock; I know cattle, so I’m going to stick to cattle, but it goes for all livestock—it’s very carefully formulated, what you feed. That was a scheduled visit. We would book that six months or a year ahead. We would know what times we would be busy harvesting crops, and we’d know what times we wouldn’t be, and that’s when we scheduled them. It was much easier to get a vet to do that. It’s preventative—and not just preventative, but a productive relationship is always more beneficial for everyone involved.

But there’s also the other part of being a large animal vet—and a small animal vet, same thing, because if an accident happens to a small animal late at night, that has to be treated right away—we still had emergency vet calls, primarily when a cow was having a calf. I have delivered—and we have delivered—many calves over my lifetime, but sometimes something happens that is beyond the farmer’s capability. So we call the vet. That can be at 3 o’clock in the morning—often, calvings don’t happen at 10:30 in the morning; the difficult ones never happen at 10:30 in the morning—and then it’s much harder to get a vet.

We were very fortunate where I live. In the New Liskeard area in the district of Timiskaming, we’ve always had access to enough vets. It’s a hub of agriculture and we serve many other parts of northern Ontario, both equipment-wise—we’ve always been very fortunate. But there are many parts of northern Ontario where the vet is not coming or the vet won’t be able to come until the next day. In that case, the animal—in ultimate severe cases, the animal might have to be euthanized.

That’s why it’s so important that we have universal access to veterinarians as much as possible. It’s at a crisis, as it is in human health care. Veterinary access is in crisis proportions, particularly in livestock medicine because many vets now who are trained go to small animal. The working conditions, in many cases, are better, and I am not criticizing anyone for their career choices. Anyone who goes into veterinary medicine, whether as a veterinarian or as a vet tech, it’s a calling and it’s a tough job, because to do that job, you have to love animals and you are going to lose animals.

I’m sure almost all of us have lost a pet. We know what that feels like. Every farmer has lost whatever type of animal they raise. It’s not quite the same as a pet, but it’s close. It can’t be quite the same as a pet because it’s your job, so you have to have a little bit of a wall, but you still feel it. If you’re a vet or a vet tech, you feel that a lot, because you get into the profession to make animals healthier. I don’t think anyone gets into the profession of veterinary medicine without a love for animals. I don’t think so.

There are cases where animals face cruel treatment. In many cases, not all, it has to do with mental health issues with their caretakers. Mental health wellness for farmers—and not just for farmers—is also in crisis. When the farmer or the farm family is facing mental health issues, often the animals suffer. I’d like to thank the member for Waterloo for bringing that up. It wasn’t part of my presentation, but I’m glad that we’re talking about that, because it is a vital role that vets play.

There’s a reality show about vets. Some of you might have heard of this show—

Just as an example—I am not going to spend an hour talking about agriculture and vets without at least having one or two cow stories.

Yes, because I usually put one or two cow stories in if I’m not talking about agriculture.

There are some common ailments that specifically dairy cows, but all cows can get. Cows have four stomachs, but dairy cows are very prone—because dairy cows are athletes. Dairy cows are athletes. They work very hard. They are attended very well, but they work very hard, and if something goes off balance, they just don’t have a bad day and come back—not often.

One of the things that afflicts dairy cattle—and it’s also partly if you get the feed wrong. There are a couple of things. One of them is called milk fever. When a cow has a calf and they start—and if there are any vets watching this, they’re going to cringe, because my description of how a cow works inside probably isn’t accurate at all. But from a farmer’s perspective, how a cow works is, a cow has a calf and its mammary glands demand calcium, and if there’s a bit of an imbalance, it takes the calcium from its muscles and it gets something called milk fever. It can’t stand up. You can feel them get cold. Everyone has a different way of handling it. I wasn’t very good at intravenous, so I didn’t do it, so we put bottles of calcium under their skin, and that would hold them until the vet came and did intravenous calcium. Most of the time, the cow would get up, but—

Something else that cattle are very prone to, especially if they get milk fever—and I hope the vets give me some latitude here—is twisted stomachs. I hope no one in the Legislature has ever talked about cows’ twisted stomachs before, but I’m—

When I first started farming, the vet would—and you couldn’t tell right away if a cow had a twisted stomach, but you can tell on their faces when they’re not happy, and their ears are cold. As soon as you see ears cold, you know you have to start checking your cow out.

Every farmer had his own something that gets cows’ stomachs activated. It doesn’t just activate my French; it also activates a cow’s stomach: beer. Very strong coffee does, too. If you mix really strong coffee and—I don’t think Hansard will cover hand motions, but you put your arm around the cow, hold their nose up and—

Laughter.

Interjections.

My first vet, Dr. Pierce, retired, and then I went to the Temiskaming vet clinic, and they did it differently. So, when we had a cow with a turned stomach, there’s a way to tie a rope right behind their front legs. If you tie it tight enough, the cow will fall on its side and then you tie the four legs, so the cow is lying prone in the pen.

Anyway, you flip the cow over and then the stomach will go naturally to where it’s supposed to.

They have four stomachs but it’s only the second stomach that causes the trouble. I hope it’s the second stomach; I’m sure a vet will text me and say no, it’s the third or fourth. But anyway, I always thought it was the second.

Then, when they feel that the stomach is in the right place, when they hear it, then they will sew the stomach back in place from the outside, and it’s much less invasive. The cow bounces back much quicker. But it’s not as—how do I put it? It’s a skill to be able to do that. Some have a better knack at it than others; it’s just a skill. It’s just like Yak is a great speaker and some of us aren’t, right? It’s a skill. Anyway, it’s much less invasive.

By the same token, if you don’t have access to a vet, that cow is not going to make it, right? And even if you do preventive—and all farmers now do, regardless of what type of livestock you have. I’m pretty sure all farmers do regular herd health.

The ARIO Act had committee hearings. Yak, you were there.

But Mark Reusser was there from the OFA, and he mentioned something about vets. He’s a turkey farmer, and each time he gets a new flock, he also gets the vet to make sure that the birds are healthy. It’s kind of the same principle.

So it’s really important that everyone has access, that all livestock farmers—and all companion-animal people too, but for livestock farmers, it’s not only their business, but also, livestock is much harder to move. If you take my example of the cow with the turned stomach, if the nearest vet is 400 miles away—in my case, Cochrane is in the north of my riding; it’s about a three-hour drive for me to go from where I live to the north tip, and that’s the closest vet. So it’s a long trip for a sick cow and the chances of survival are less. Also, you’re trucking that cow back while it’s still in a frail state.

They are looking at ways to be able to do this because it’s a fact of life: We don’t have enough vets. We talk about this on all sides of the House: Animal agriculture is expanding in northern Ontario, but the vets haven’t. Because we’ve got a shortage of vets, it’s harder to get them. I give credit where credit is due: The government has created a program—I believe vets get $50,000 over five years. I think that makes sense.

Another thing that’s just happened is—I talked about this in my first session on this bill but we’ll talk about it a little bit again—again, similar to human health care, it’s harder to get doctors in remote areas, so it’s harder to get vets in remote areas. Where I live, close to New Liskeard, Temiskaming Shores, I don’t consider it remote, but other people maybe would. For years, we’ve had the Northern Ontario School of Medicine so that we get people who grew up in rural Ontario, grew up in northern Ontario, go to medical school, know how great a place it is to live, and it’s easier to not only attract them but to retain them, because they’re used to that, the lifestyle that we love so much.

With vets, it’s the same thing. A program has been created that you can do your first couple of years of veterinary school at Lakehead in Thunder Bay and then go to the University of Guelph, which is the veterinary school of Ontario where all of our vets are trained. But having a campus in Thunder Bay will attract people, hopefully, as the Northern Ontario School of Medicine does, from northern Ontario or from rural Ontario. And hopefully they will be more attracted to large animal agriculture than people who, if you’ve never been exposed to large animal agriculture—you love animals and you get trained to be a vet—it’s a bigger transition. If you’re used to small animals, great, but if the only exposure you’ve had to large animals is through the veterinary course, there’s less of a chance of you becoming a large animal vet.

I mentioned this this morning, too, and I think it’s worthy of mentioning again: To become a vet, to get into vet school, it’s really tough. Now, I was a farmer my whole life, but you know what? I never would have had the grades or the smarts to be a vet—ever. I love animals, but it’s really, really, really tough. I said this morning I don’t think the bar needs to be lowered, but it needs to be shifted. I don’t know exactly how to say this—and I’ve talked to lots of people about this in the farm world—we have to somehow also take the lived experience into account.

So an example—I always use personal experiences, but I hope that I can relate to people by using personal experiences: My kids didn’t want to be vets, and I’m not sure—some of my kids might have had the grades to make it; they didn’t get it from me, but they got some brains—but my kids did see all these things happening. My kids helped with cows with twisted stomachs. My kids helped cows calve. They did all these things. So they have a lived experience that some others might not have. And by the same token, I’m sure there are people who have lived experience with small animals that my kids didn’t have. But if we’re looking for large animal vets, we have to, over the long term, take that lived experience into account. It’s a bit like this place, right? Lived experience should count, and I think it does.

I’m really going on a tangent now, but one of the great things about this place that I didn’t realize—when I got elected here, I assumed that everyone else was going to be a lawyer or a poli sci grad. I’ve got nothing against lawyers and poli sci grads. I’ve got a daughter who’s a lawyer.

Interjection.

And our two different styles reflect that. You’re very researched; you know what you’re talking about—and me, maybe not so much.

What I have learned about this place is, all our past experiences add to this place—the lived experience, right? The member from Peterborough is nodding. There are things that we’ve all done in our past—that we know something that you didn’t learn in school. That’s important. And in veterinary medicine, we need to look at that, too.

I’d like to switch, because I think I’ve covered the vet part—I might go back to it, but I’ve got a few more cow stories if I run out of time.

Another important part of this bill is the vet tech part. Vet techs are going to be a regulated profession. As veterinary medicine gets much more advanced, much more technical, and as we continue with a shortage of vets, there are many things that a vet tech can do very well; in some cases, maybe not as well as the vet, but maybe better than—and I’m going to again use myself as an example—the livestock owner. But we have to be sure that they’re actually capable, trained to do that, and having them as a registered profession, I think, is a step forward.

I’ll go back to my cow analogy. As I just said, I could never—and I tried it; I am no good at intravenous. I just can’t do intravenous on a cow; I just can’t find the vein, but a vet tech could. So if we can’t get the vet, if the vet is doing something that only the vet can do—a very difficult calving or something—or if there’s a disease outbreak and we need the vet’s not only institutional knowledge but practical knowledge to deal with that, then maybe the vet tech can handle my cow with milk fever. That’s really important.

I don’t want to cause a feud between vets and vet techs, because they work together. They’re also—we hear this a lot from both sides: an interdisciplinary team. Well, that’s vets and vet techs, too. It’s really important.

Actually, one of my staff is a trained vet tech. It’s very interesting, talking to her, because of her lived experience. Cathy Pfeifer is her name. I hope I don’t get in big trouble for saying this, but one of the reasons that makes her great at being a constituency assistant—one of the things that I didn’t realize was so hard about being a vet tech is the personal part. I focused on large animal vets, but if you think about small animals, companion animals, they’re part of your family. If grave decisions have to be made, or if very grave things are going to happen regardless of what you do, it’s the same as losing any other family member.

Vets deal with that too, but vet techs deal with that a lot. If you think about that, that is really, really tough, the social part of that. They deal with people whose—if your companion animal, your dog, your cat has a disease or is hit by something or attacked by a coyote, it’s all-consuming. That falls on the vet tech.

If you think about that—I never really fully until I talked to Cathy. She’s really good at talking to people, and it comes really naturally to her. I didn’t really clue in to why until she started talking about being a vet tech and that actually, in some ways, a constituency assistant was almost easier than a vet tech. And that’s saying something, because we all have people in our offices who do intake, who do—I can’t speak for other offices; I’ll speak for mine. My staff does the majority of the casework. They know more about most things than I do, and they take the toughest stuff. They get it first.

How I learned that—I’m going to go off on another tangent since nobody has done a section 23 on me yet. When I—

Interjection.

Aw, come on. Otherwise, I’ll start reading petitions. I’ll steal Dave’s.

Probably one of the best lessons I ever learned with this job is when I was first successful at running. We took over from another party, so we had no staff for a month and a half or so. My wife and I answered phones two or three days a week—

I’m assuming in a rural riding like mine—I don’t think it’s much different, but often, our offices are the last stop. If people don’t know what to do, where to go, and even if it’s not a provincial responsibility, even if there’s nothing we can do about it, they call, and they want to talk to somebody. That’s tough—

Anyway, I really went off on a tangent there. Getting back to the act, like I said this morning, we are going to support it. Like I said this morning, when an act contains—when it’s about issues that are compatible, when there are no poison pills in it, when there’s no—and we might vote against other acts that we are philosophically opposed to. But it’s often frustrating when the government puts many things which we are in favour of and then puts one or two things we absolutely cannot support, and then you can run around and say we voted against hospitals because you put crazy things in a budget bill which we can’t support. And we know how that game is played, but that’s what you are doing. To the minister’s credit and the ministry’s credit, they didn’t do it with this one.

But we do have a couple of questions because we also did consultation ourselves on this. And, as what we should do when you do consultation to find out what the stakeholders feel, and if there is anything that can be improved—and when we did our consultation on this, on the bill, we didn’t get a lot of—and that’s why I feel comfortable saying the government did a god job consulting. Not everyone was 100% on board but everyone thought it was not just an incremental step forward but it needed to be done.

But there are a couple of questions, and I asked the parliamentary assistant this morning. This is basically a regulatory act, so it talks about the college of veterinarians; it talks about regulating vet techs; and it’s very prescriptive on what a veterinarian can be called. So, “Unless otherwise permitted by the regulations, no person other than a veterinarian member shall use the title ‘veterinarian’, ‘veterinary surgeon’ or ‘doctor’ or variations, abbreviations, abbreviations of variations or equivalents in another language, while engaged in the practice of veterinary medicine.” And then veterinary technician members. But it has an exception—chiropractors—and that kind of stuck out to me.

Now, I’m sure that there are chiropractors. We never use a chiropractor on a dairy farm, but I’m sure—I’m not the saying that chiropractic medicine shouldn’t be a part of veterinary medicine. But I don’t think the College of Chiropractors of Ontario covers veterinary medicine. So I asked this morning why there is a carve-out for chiropractors. With some of the stakeholders, that’s one of the issues that came up. Why?

And also, if there is a carve-out for chiropractors, so a chiropractor can call themselves a doctor under this act—and it just kind of stuck out. So we’re hoping that when this bill goes to committee, we have an answer to that. It comes up a couple of times.

So it’s very prescriptive for what authorized activities can be of both the vets and of the vet techs. There’s part III of the bill, which is “Authorized activities, risk of harm and restricted titles”, and it lays out what the members can do and what conditions they can treat. It’s very prescriptive, as it should be, under the college of physicians—it’s the college of veterinary medicine, but as it is with physicians, because it also lays out very strict rules, very strict processes if someone with a veterinary license doesn’t live up to the standards of the college of what the penalties could be.

It’s very prescriptive, as it should be, but there’s a carve-out for chiropractors. Again, I’m not criticizing; it very well could be legitimate, but it just doesn’t seem to fit. Some in the college of veterinary medicine also raised that concern, that something just doesn’t fit with the rest. That’s actually one of the bigger concerns. Perhaps we can flesh that out as we go forward.

I hate to give too many compliments to the government—and I don’t give compliments at all—but this act is an example of the way legislation should work. When it’s time to update something, you consult it widely, you bring it to the Legislature and have good debate about it, you talk about the issues themselves and, hopefully, at the end of the day, the people of Ontario are better served and in this case, also, animals in Ontario are better served. For most things we talk only about people, but this act is also about animals. And animals, to many people, are as important—or more important—than people. In many cases animals play a huge role in our lives.

I’ve got five minutes left. What am I going to do in five minutes?

I have some cow stories, but not all of them—

That’s why the veterinary techs are now part of a regulated profession under this bill. That’s also very important, so that you know when someone has a designation they’ve had the training to actually be worthy of that designation. That’s really important. I said this at the start: This is a regulatory bill about regulating vets and regulating vet techs. That’s what this whole bill is about.

The minister talked about the importance of agriculture in Ontario. Those of us who are actually in the industry know the importance that veterinary medicine plays. Something I just noticed, at a glance, but something else veterinary medicine plays a very important role in is disease outbreaks. There are things like avian influenza, swine fever, BSE—mad cow disease, but it’s bovine—I’ll stick with mad cow disease. You need veterinary expertise to be able to understand and control—“control” is probably the wrong word, but—

Interjection.

I’m going to go back to something I’m the best at, and that’s talking about my own farm. I remember when I started farming and I took over my dad’s farm. Younger, more aggressive, I wanted to up the production in the cows, but I didn’t fully understand feed formulations as much as I should have and I had—we’ll go back to twisted stomachs—eight cows in a row. When I started milking, we milked 30, and when you have eight out of 30—I just about lost the farm, and it was my own management, right? Because I didn’t understand and, at that point, I didn’t have a good enough relationship either with my feed—

I’ll give you one last example, Speaker: Avian influenza is very—that’s not a cow disease; “avian,” that’s a bird disease. But we have wild birds flying around that also carry it, so that’s one of the reasons why many people are worried about backyard flocks of chickens, because they could be vectors for avian influenza. You don’t think about that, but they could be.

Anyway, I’ve only got a few seconds left, so I’d like to thank you very much for allowing me to speak for this long.

I covered it a bit in my speech, but when we’re short of vets, or even if we’re not, the veterinary technician can perform tasks that could, in emergency situations—or even in consultative situations, but certainly in emergency situations—save an animal’s life. And that is a big step forward. It makes a big difference in rural Ontario if we can call and—I always go back to: It’s similar to a doctor and nurse practitioner. It’s very similar; very similar.

Or wanted to.

But there’s nothing in this bill—it’s a regulatory bill. It’s not going to directly impact them. But it is a big concern.

I don’t want to get all the veterinarians in the world mad at me, but now that we can do pregnancy checks with ultrasound, I think a vet tech could do that, someone trained—because we have AI technicians who breed cows, right? But a vet tech, someone with expertise, should be able to do pregnancy diagnosis very easily. I think that opens up more expertise for vets to look at disease reduction, increasing production. Animal health is going to be more and more important, and I think that will give more breadth to that.

Dr. Connie Dancho and Dr. Lance Males were my later vets at the Temiskaming veterinary clinic. Again, they taught me the value of doing regular herd health, the long-term value.

I don’t know if they’re famous, but they’ve certainly made a huge difference to the farmers in Timiskaming.