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.

Let’s talk about competition and let’s talk about math. Since the Conservative government was elected in this province in 2018, the cost of a house has doubled in the province of Ontario—doubled. Since the member is very interested in economics, I would like to think that the scaffolding of the dismal science of economics is math, and I’m wondering if it’s comfortable for the member—whose company I enjoy, for the record—that we have minoritarian rule in this bill, that a third of an elected body can make a decision. I’m wondering if the member is actually comfortable with that. It would be like handing over the levers to the opposition parties. Are you prepared to have a motion, with unanimous consent, to allow us to run the province of Ontario if you very much believe in this bill?