She was hopping around all over the thing.

I just want to say to the Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and her staff and the folks at OMAFRA: What a great job. Here we stand today and we have a bill that ostensibly satisfies the opposition, notwithstanding the member from Oshawa who raised some issues that maybe aren’t addressed in this bill. But one bill alone can never address all of the issues here in the province of Ontario, no matter what the sector. I mean, it would take more than one bill just to figure me out.

But I do want to say that this is something that is increasingly rare and a real breath of fresh air, when you have a bill where you’ve gone through the process. You haven’t done this willy-nilly or with your eyes half-closed; you’ve gone through the process of consulting properly with all of the stakeholders involved in the sector, and that in itself, I think, is a lesson to be learned. We can accomplish a lot in this place by going through that process on a repetitive basis, and that’s exactly what our government wants to do: We want to bring forth good legislation that speaks to a need.

A lot of people would ask themselves, “Are you kidding me that this act essentially hadn’t been reviewed or updated since 1989?” Our youngest daughter, Emily, was born in 1989. She’s going to be 35 years old this year. I can’t imagine anything in 35 years not having been updated. I mean, I’ve been updated several times, and there’s no chance of actually getting it right, but I have been updated several times, and 35 years is a long time to go.

And I’m not a farmer. I think everybody here knows this. It doesn’t mean I can’t spread it, but I’m not a farmer by trade. However, one of the things we all know about farming—or we should know—is that each and every one of us has an absolute biological need to be nourished: to eat, to drink, to take on the kinds of food and the liquids that sustain us. I think sometimes we lose sight—not intentionally; just because we live in a world that is running helter-skelter and all over the place, and our attention is taken here and there—of where that nourishment comes from. We lose sight of the fact that without our farmers, without those who produce the food, we’re going to starve, unless you’re going to produce it yourself, which brings me back to the old days, way before my time—in fact, even before you, Minister Lumsden.

So I think about the stories that my dad would tell, because it’s before his time too. Let me think—one, two, three—I’m fifth-generation here in Canada. My family immigrated from what was then what was then West Prussia, Poland, in 1868, and they, like everybody else, were given a tract of land, 100 acres. The old homestead still exists down Siberia Road, in what we call Siberia. It’s not like the Siberia in Russia, but it’s not far from it. This was a tract of land that they were given: “Now you’re going to be here in Canada.”

My great-great-grandfather Paul Yakabuski—my father’s name was Paul Yakabuski as well—was the first one of our clan to come on the Yakabuski side. The Conways came from Ireland, of course, and they settled more in the Brudenell area. But in the Siberia Road area, many of the Polish settlers, from the Kashubian part of Poland, came and settled there.

I’m telling you, if you’ve never been to my area, you’re going to ask yourself, “Besides rocks, what could you grow there?” It was some of the most un-arable land that you could think of—just pitiful. But by the sweat of their brow and by their commitment to a new land and a new life—think about it: In the first year you were there, you would have to have crops in the ground and a roof over your head. Obviously, people helped one another. You didn’t have the ABC construction company coming in and, “Well, we’ll pour the foundation, and Joe’s going to come and do the framing, and Billy will put the roof on.” No. Work had to be done in a very rudimentary way. The cabins and the things that were built were pretty basic, but all the while, you had to be prepared to be able to produce some food, and if you didn’t, you had to be able to barter some things with someone who was producing food. So when you think about it, that’s absolutely the kind of life when it began here in Canada for our ancestors that came from different parts of the world but primarily European countries and what it was like.

So my grandfather Frank Yakabuski bought a business from a fellow by the name of Stephen Smith, and his original business was farm implements and things such as that that everybody needed some kind of. Everybody had some farming. Whether they were doing some crops or raising some livestock, almost everybody that had one of those 100-acre plots did some farming on their own. So that was part of his business.

And I tell you this story about my grandfather—I mean, obviously, I wasn’t there, but he may have gotten into that business somewhat by design or somewhat by accident. But he bought the business from a fella by the name of Stephen Smith, and I can only surmise that Stephen Smith decided he wanted to get out of the business because he wanted to leave Barry’s Bay, and I’ll tell you why. The house that we live in, my wife, Vicky, and—our children were raised in there as well. It’s on the same plot, on the same piece of ground that my grandfather’s house was on, and he didn’t just buy the business from Stephen Smith; he bought the house. And I can only surmise that Stephen Smith wanted to start a new life of his own, because in the early 1900s—and we lived beside the cemetery. In the early 1900s, during a diphtheria epidemic—and I’m not going to say exactly. I’m not sure if it’s eight or nine, but Stephen Smith and his wife lost eight children during that diphtheria epidemic. So you can imagine what he would have gone through, him and his family, and they just wanted to have a start somewhere else.

So my grandfather bought the house, he bought the business, and that’s how he got into business. He was also an undertaker, because do you know what? It doesn’t matter how small the town is, it doesn’t matter where you come from, people die, and somebody’s got to look after the dead. Well, that was what my grandfather did as well.

So, all along, we’ve seen the evolution to some degree of the agricultural industry in my neck of the woods, as they say, which is not unique. Everybody sitting here, if their families were here, went through that same thing. Somewhere here in Canada, it might have been Saskatchewan, like my colleague from Eglinton–Lawrence; it might have been somewhere else, but everybody who came here in that period, in the 1800s, went through that same kind of heartache, hardship, wondering if they were going to survive but slowly inching ahead, and the same thing happened to our agricultural industry.

Can you imagine the stoneboats? If you come to my area and you—Wilno. You may have heard of the Wilno hills. It’s famous for the stone fences, and Brenda Lee-Whiting actually wrote a book called Harvest of Stones. It’s about farming in Renfrew county in the early days, because that’s what it was, a harvest of stones. And it’s amazing, because every spring, you thought you had them all, and every spring, there was a whole new crop of stones, because the frost would drive them up, the ones that you didn’t get the year before, and you had to deal with those stones that year.

So this is part of the growth and the, as I say, the evolution. Technology: I mean, we don’t think of going from plowing by hand and then having a horse to pull that plow as technology, but that’s exactly what it is; it’s just a different kind at a different stage. So slowly but surely, they improved the way that they cultivated and harvested.

And that speaks to why our government—and our government values agriculture at the highest level, because, as I said in my opening remarks, you can do without that fancy new car and you can do without 27 pairs of shoes—okay, maybe some can’t—but you can’t live without food. You can’t live without food. And that’s why you have to, every day—I’m sure you’ve seen the little licence plate holders, the frames around the licence plates. I think it says something like “Did you eat today?” or “If you ate today, thank a farmer.” Well, that’s exactly what our government sees. And farmers are feeling the pressure of not enough veterinarians, something that we recognize.

I want to thank my colleague the Associate Minister of Housing for the work that he did. He criss-crossed this province, and I’ll tell you about Pembroke. He came to my riding, in Pembroke—the biggest consultation they had, the best-attended consultation they had. I think it was the fact that we brought some snacks. But he traversed this province to find out what people were saying on the ground, what the real people were saying about agriculture and the situation regarding veterinary medicine here in Ontario. He didn’t go out there with a preconceived picture of what we needed to do; he went out with his eyes open and his ears open, and maybe his mouth shut a little bit.

Along with the PA from Chatham-Kent–Leamington—

Interjection: Great guy.