We enjoy great privileges in being elected officials, and one of them is when the community reaches out to us and touches us personally.

I want to thank the students from Hopewell public school and their teacher Ms. Vorobej, who are hopefully watching this right now—hello, everybody—for touching my heart about an issue I was unaware of before your leadership, and that is the health of Ontario’s boreal caribou.

These students at Hopewell public school did a module last semester where they talked about the fact that of the 51 populations of boreal caribou in Canada, 37 of those populations are deemed not self-sustaining. What it means for our pristine and beautiful north is that the species of the boreal caribou, an iconic species for Ontario, are literally poised, potentially, for extinction. I note that Ministers of the Environment in this current government and previous have made this a priority, and I note that the federal government has said that Ontario needs to have the strategy that they deem to be acceptable by this month, April 2024.

I want to thank the students from Hopewell public school who wrote me personal notes and who helped collaborate with me in a letter to Minister Andrea Khanjin that I will be hand-delivering this morning, because that is what citizenship actually is. Citizenship is when you use your voice to speak out to people in our profession, to send a message, to care about someone you’ve never met.

Bless you, students at Hopewell public school. Thank you for your leadership. Let’s work together to protect the boreal caribou.