The member from Ottawa Centre just inspired to me ask a question. I’m known, in my house, as a person who takes care of most of the food waste. It is very visible, in that case, and I enjoy it.

We waste $49 billion of food in Canada each and every year. I’m just wondering if you could elaborate on the importance, from a financial perspective, a climate perspective and a food security perspective—why it’s so important that we reduce that $49-billion number.

It’s a real honour to rise to speak to Bill 155, the Agricultural Research Institute of Ontario Amendment Act. You don’t hear this a lot, maybe, in the House, but I just want to compliment the minister for bringing forward this bill. I know it’s something that people in the farm community, people in the food sector and researchers, in particular, in the food and farming sector have been asking for: modernization of the ARIO Act. A lot has changed since 1962 when the institute was founded by the three founding colleges of the University of Guelph, obviously located in my riding: the Ontario Veterinary College, the Ontario Agricultural College and the Macdonald Institute.

While I’m just on those, Speaker, I really quickly just want to say we’re blessed in Ontario to have a university like the University of Guelph. OVC ranks first in Canada, third in North America and is in the top 10 worldwide for veterinary medicine and does a fantastic job. We certainly want to continue working to expand the opportunities at OVC because it’s harder to get into veterinary school right now than it is to get into medical school, so we certainly need more spaces in our veterinary college. I also just want to mention that the Ontario Agricultural College ranks in the top 10 worldwide for agriculture and forestry. Then, obviously, the Macdonald Institute has been doing pioneering work over the years as well.

While I’m talking about the Macdonald Institute, I just want to give a shout-out to our former late colleague Daryl Kramp, whose bill he put forward around food literacy—

Interjections.

The act was last updated in the 1990s, so prior to cellphones, prior to the Internet, prior to a lot of the innovations that we see in the world today, and the food and farming sector has changed. When I was a kid driving a tractor, I could drive the tractor and work on the tractor. Now you kind of drive the tractor with your phone, and I have no idea how you would ever fix the tractor if anything went down with the tractor. Things have changed a lot, and we need to make sure this institute and the 14 research locations that it represents are modernized with that change. So, I think it’s a good thing that we do that.

Speaker, I wanted to mention a few things, though, and these are going to be constructive, and I hope helpful constructive criticism and is taken in that light. If we’re going to modernize this act, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture—Mark Reusser from the region of Waterloo came and I think gave a fantastic presentation at committee. I’ve had a lot of conversations with Mark over the years, and especially recently about the importance of protecting prime farmland in this province and, in particular, in Waterloo region, where he’s very active right now. But in relation to this bill, he brought up some—and he said this in support of the bill. I’m going to be very clear: OFA called for modernization; the government has delivered on modernization. But there are some things that I think are important to put into the record.

One is that farmers have a direct involvement in the institute, especially as it modernizes, and that their voices—as the scope of the institute expands and the number of food value chain stakeholders becomes more prominent in the role that the institute plays, that farmers still have a direct role in the direction of research and in participation in research.

The second is, if the research mandate of the institute is going to expand, which I think is a good thing, then make sure the institute has the financial resources to be able to deliver on the mandate of that expanded mandate.

That the oversight of facilities improve: There were examples, not actually brought by the OFA but by other farmers, particularly a berry farmer, who talked about the fact that some of the research that they were doing, because of inadequate maintenance of facilities, led to their berries molding, and the research was lost. So they just talked about the importance of making sure we maintain the facilities in a way that, when the farmers in particular are doing research at these 14 locations around the province, their research isn’t damaged in any way due to the inadequacies of the facilities themselves. You could imagine the time, money, aggravation lost in doing that.

Concerns around making sure that industry representatives, particularly farmers but also throughout the entire value chain, serve on the board of the institute moving forward: That’s not clear in the legislation. I’m assuming the minister is going to ensure that, but I think it’s important to have it on the record and important to let folks know that farmers express that.

And then the final point I want to make is funding for our colleges and universities. At the same time this bill was in front of committee. The head of the faculty association at University of Guelph came and talked about how in her department they’re going to lose two of the three plant scientists, and they don’t have the financial resources to replace those plant scientists. That’s going to hurt the ability to do this kind of research in the province of Ontario, and that’s why we need to adequately fund our post-secondary universities.

I appreciate the member’s question. Thank you very much for it. I do want to be clear—and this is in all respect—that doesn’t deal with this particular bill. But your question is very important, and so I want to say to the Minister of Agriculture the work that we did advocating for an expansion of the vet program is really important.

When I was asked in last year’s budget what was the one thing I really liked about the budget, it was funding for this exact program that you’re asking me about. The partnership between the University of Guelph and Lakehead University and the expansion of veterinary spaces, particularly targeting northern communities, is a step in the right direction.

We know that there’s a shortage of veterinarians across the province, but there’s especially an acute shortage of veterinarians, especially large animal veterinarians, in northern Ontario. This particular funding in the expansion of this program and the partnership between Lakehead and the University of Guelph is going to make a real difference.

Mark Reusser, when he came to committee, made it very clear that the OFA supports this bill. I’ll be voting in favour of this bill. But in his testimony and in his broader public comments, he has indicated that, do you know what? If we don’t have farmland, if we continue to lose farmland at the rate of 319 acres every day in this province, we’re not going to have a food and farming sector to actually do research on. And so we have to build homes within existing urban areas. We have to look at doing industrial applications on land that’s not prime farmland, because it’s so critical to our economy and our ability to feed ourselves.

Report continues in volume B.