There’s no such thing as a bad petition; there are ones that are way too long—and the incredibly long one from the member from Peterborough are going to be, if this motion passes today or tomorrow morning, the last two petitions heard in this House—a good example and a not-so-good example.

But the problem that they’re trying to fix, the loophole that the government identified, is their own. They’re creating their own problem. I don’t understand what the purpose of that is. For the life of me, Speaker, I don’t.

Another one: private members’ bills. The government House leader raised points about private members’ bills that I agree with in a way but also that I disagree with in a way. Private members’ bills: So each member in this House who’s not a minister has the ability—there is a draw, and during the session each member has the ability to bring one piece of private legislation forward in the House, one time per session. It’s a pretty big deal, right? Once again, you pick issues that are relevant to the people you represent, relevant to your area, relevant to a cause that’s really important. Sometimes that’s something that is not really a government priority, but it’s something that could be, should be made into legislation.

The latest one—I’m trying to think—is Orthodox Christian Week, presented by the member from Humber River–Black Creek. It had universal approval.

So now we have one private member’s bill a day, except on Mondays, but Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 6 o’clock until 6:45. We’ve been battling each other all day, and from 6 to 6:45 sometimes we’re not at our best. We’re not at our friendliest sometimes, Speaker, and sometimes it slips through.

It used to be it was on Thursdays. The House leader has a point that not everyone got to vote on that bill because if the vote was deferred till Monday—or if it wasn’t deferred, not everybody got to vote on it. That’s a fair point. But when all the private members’ bills were held in one session, the actual tone of the chamber was different.

I loved Thursday afternoons. I was here all the time because, often, it was less partisan. People spoke more often like I’m speaking now, without notes, just from the heart. And although sometimes the issues weren’t earth-shattering to the general population, we had some of the best debates—sometimes oppositional, but some of the best debates that we ever had in this Legislature. It wasn’t just people in the backrooms writing notes; it was people actually sharing opinions and opposing opinions, and sometimes changing each other’s minds. We lost that. We lost that when it was moved from Thursdays. That we disagree—is it something that is actually really going to change how the system works for the people of Ontario? No. We’ll work with what we have, but it is an example of what is on paper sometimes doesn’t work as well in reality.

The government just made another change in this standing order. So there is something, ministerial statements—sometimes when a bill is introduced, a minister makes a statement, but more often on a special day like International Women’s Day. The government has 20 minutes, recognized opposition parties have five and the independents had to ask for unanimous consent. It’s important for people to realize that any rule here can be superseded by something called a unanimous consent motion. If someone asks for something and everyone agrees, it happens. A unanimous consent motion trumps everything. But for whatever reason, the government said no to International Women’s Day for the independents to speak. In the end, they changed their mind, and I commend them for that.

Now they’re going to change the standing orders so that the opposition and the independents share eight minutes, and the opposition speaks first. I don’t think that’s an improvement necessarily, but I just want to make it clear: When these standing orders pass—they’re going to pass. The government has a huge majority, so they’re going to pass.

I will be speaking against the changes to petitions. I want to give you an example as to why it is important to read, word for word, a petition. Do I agree with a petition that lasts for 15 minutes? No. Would I agree to a change that says, “You have no more than 90 seconds. You have no more than 60 seconds to present a petition”? Absolutely. But that you cannot read word for word, I don’t agree with that.

I want to give an example that happened in this House on February 20, so the day that we were coming back. That day, a hip hop artist called Bishop Brigante was at Queen’s Park. He had come to Queen’s Park because he is a 45-year-old man that was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in stage 4 and is going through therapy. He had decided that what happened to him should not happen to anybody else. It took him two years before he was able to gain access to the colonoscopy, and he wants rules for access to colonoscopies to change.

There are bodies of evidence that show that it should start earlier than 50 years old, which is the benchmark in Ontario for where you get the colonoscopy. So he took from his experience, and he wrote a petition himself. Is he an expert in health care? Absolutely not, but he is someone with lived experience who now knows full well that, had he had access to a colonoscopy when his symptoms first started and he started to go to the doctor, he would not have waited until stage 4 to start his treatment. His prognosis would be different, and things should change. So he wrote this petition.

The petition is quite simple. It asks for the age limit to be dropped from 50 to 30 if you have symptoms that you have problems with your colon. That’s all that the petition said. It was a normal petition.

But I want to read to you what he said about coming in here. I introduced him, Bishop Brigante. I introduced his wife, Melanie McVey; his dad, Oscar Parra; his friend Atiba Roach, who all came because they wanted to be there when I read his petition. And here’s what he had to say:

“We had been put into this balcony and I had seen this room on the news before, never paid” any attention to it “because I was never into politics, but I remember seeing it and I remember being in there. I was like, oh my goodness, what, where are we? This is like some secret stuff or something, it’s the government, you know what I mean? You just don’t know.

“If you don’t know, it’s very surreal. But again, eye on the prize: What is going to happen here? Let’s wait” and see.

And then I introduced his family.

He says, “People stood up” and clapped and then “France ... read the petition”—and this is where it becomes really meaningful, Speaker. At that moment, “I literally left my body. And I started thinking about the nightmare again, the moment that I was diagnosed with cancer, the fear, the terror, the sadness, the disbelief, the grip that I had on my girl’s hand, holding on for dear life.

“As France was reading the petition, I thought of millions of other people after me that are going to experience that nightmare and I said, ‘Change has to come.’ And every word that France said in that petition reading was so powerful that I started seeing in my mind, the millions dropped down to hundreds of thousands, dropped down to thousands.” It “just kept decreasing, victims of this horrible disease. I envisioned it, it happened in my mind, and then I came back into my body and I sat there, just like, I looked at France and, you know, she thanked me and everything and I was just like, God bless you. And I so believe ... that out-of-body experience of seeing all of those casualties become people who just got to live their lives and the number just dropped so drastically.

“It was the most powerful thing that I’ve ever experienced in my body and it just gave me more purpose.”

I wanted to share that because this is what happens when you read the words of somebody who has really put in a lot of time, effort and energy. When I read his petition, he and his wife had collected over 17,000 signatures on that petition. That petition now stands at over 35,000 signatures.

You have to realize that this man is still going through cancer treatment. He is on his 10th round of chemotherapy—chemotherapy that is just brutally hard when you’re diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer, chemotherapy that lasts for three days in a row, 24 hours. You come out of there with no strength, no ability to do anything, but you keep fighting because your life depends on it. And even in that state of—he could have taken off. He doesn’t. He wanted to fight for other people so that what happened to him does not happen to other people.

They came here to listen to the words that he had written. He could not read it for himself because it’s only MPPs. I read it for him, and it was really powerful for him, for his family. And I can tell you, the minute that it got read in the House, it went from 17,000 to 35,000 signatures. It had meaning. But it also had meaning that I did not have to summarize what he had said. Those were his words—the words of a person who has gone through really tough times because he did not get access to diagnostic tests, a colonoscopy, in time.

Let’s be frank: Nobody gets in line for a colonoscopy. It’s not something—on a scale of zero to 10, how much fun is it to get a colonoscopy? It rates a zero. It’s no fun at all. People don’t volunteer. Ontarians are not going to throw down the doors: “I want a colonoscopy.” No, no, no—none of that. He knows that. He also knows that a lot of people, and I would say a lot of BIPOC—Black, Indigenous, people of colour—are seeing a high rate of colorectal cancer diagnosed at stage 4 because they do not have access.

What this man is trying to do is change this. And what I read into record is basically his words. That I was able to read the words that he had put on a petition, word for word for him, onto the record, in a place that he had never come before—he had never been here before. He did not even know what the “NDP” stood for. He’s not a political activist or anything like this, but somebody who believed that having his words read in the Legislative Assembly had meaning, and now, we are about to take that away.

Had he come to me tomorrow, I would not be able to read his words into the record; I would have to summarize his words into the record. This is wrong. People are allowed to be heard. If some of the petitions are too long, put a time limit on it. We put a time limit on members’ statements, and everybody respects that more or less—90, 92, 93 seconds, and then end of story. Your microphone goes off and it’s finished. If petitions are too long, do the same thing, but don’t change it so that the people who take the time to write down a petition that is meaningful to them, that we would not be able to read their words into the record.

There are not very many chances for people to speak in this House. We have to speak for them. Let us read words that they want us to speak for them. I give the example of Bishop Brigante, a 45-year-old man diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, but I could go through most of the petitions that I read and the same.

I want to talk about Helena Shepherd-Snider. She is the woman who picked up the phone while her husband was having a heart attack and discovered that 911 was not available. She lives in my riding. In a big part of my riding 911 is not available. She is one who wrote the petition that I read into the record many times to make 911 available everywhere. It is meaningful to her that I read her words into the record. She goes out and gets—this petition, same thing—thousands and thousands of names of people who live mainly in northern Ontario where we don’t have access to 911.

Another petition, “Make Highway 144 Safe at Marina Road.” That came from Chantal—I’m not sure I’m allowed to say her last name. That came from Chantal. Same thing—she lives in Onaping Falls. She has seen many accidents. We have had multiple deaths every single year on Highway 144 at Marina Road, where there’s two great big S turns followed by a train track going across. When I read that petition, “Make Highway 144 Safe at Marina Road,” I read the words of the constituents who want to make things better.

To take away that little opportunity for people to have their voices heard at Queen’s Park is wrong. To limit the time, I fully agree. Put a limit of 60 seconds, put a limit of 45 seconds, if you want, on petitions. Put a limit of 90 seconds. Like, I don’t care. But what the member from Peterborough–Kawartha has been doing to read petitions signed by one person that last 17 minutes is disrespectful to all of the people who have written their own petitions, have gone out and gathered signatures from people they know, from their families, their friends, their co-workers and then want to hear their words read at Queen’s Park. Don’t take that away from the people of Ontario. They deserve to be heard.