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?