Of course, a great member, an OPP officer. I’ve got so much respect. Thank you for your service.

And, of course, the Minister of Agriculture: We heard her speak today for 60 minutes, and she covers it all. She has done it all. She understands the file so much better than someone like myself.

But what I get excited about is when you see the results of those processes. Those meetings that were held—I don’t have the list in front of me, but you heard from Minister Flack and Minister Thompson. You’ve heard from them where all those consultations were. I was part of the one in Pembroke, and let me tell you, folks: Everybody here, I’m sure that your grandmother said at some time that you learn something new every day, and if you don’t, well, you’ve been sleeping or something. But I can’t tell you how much I learned at that meeting about veterinary medicine, but not only the medicine itself; the problems that are out there: not enough veterinarians.

Our farmland is more productive than it has ever been. We produced more on our farmland today than we ever have. We’re an exporting province in agricultural products, even after we’re feeding our 15-million-people population. Because of technology, we’re more productive, but that means we can raise more livestock. It also means we need to be able to take care of those livestock.

When you look at rural Ontario—and I want to thank the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane, because he can paint a picture pretty well about what it’s like in northern Ontario, because that’s his canvas. He knows it. The challenge of getting a veterinarian to the place of where he or she is needed when you’ve got miles and miles between them and the farm is a daunting task.

So how do you address that? Well, one of the things you do is you graduate more veterinarians. So 20 additional seats between Thunder Bay and Guelph means we’re going to have more veterinarians able to service those farms. “Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” as they say. You can’t go wrong with that one. Now, on top of that—and I’m just touching the surface of this bill; I could speak for a week if I actually knew more about it.

But what about $50,000 over five years to assist a new veterinarian who’s willing to work and serve a rural or remote area? How is that going to help the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane and anybody else that has an expanse in the rural areas? Do you know how you make those decisions? You come to the conclusions from listening to people. Oh, I’m so excited about this, because of the work that’s been done to get to where we are today.

Now, that’s not all. That’s not all—

Veterinary technicians are the livestock-animal answer to the nurse practitioner. So we’re going to increase and broaden the scope of practice for veterinary technicians. Again, you want to talk about getting it right? There’s no such thing as getting it more than 100% right, but if they ever invent that, here’s something that does get it that way, because that’s exactly what we need: more people who can deliver the service to the farms. And we’re not just talking about large animals here—for the farms, it’s large animals mainly—but also pets and small animals as well. Because we have a shortage of vets in every sector.

So I want to just thank everyone who’s been so involved and active in this, and I did want to just comment on one thing from the member for Oshawa, as she was talking about animal abuse. I’ve always believed that anybody who will abuse an animal, you can count on that person as being someone who will abuse another human being as well. There is no excuse. It can never be acceptable, and it needs to be dealt with in the harshest ways possible. Do we agree 100% on that?

So as I said, Speaker, and I didn’t even get to all of the copious notes that I put down here, but I want to thank everybody who’s been so involved in this. It’s a great piece of legislation. I look forward to the further debate, and I thank the opposition for stating clearly right from the start that they’re going to support this bill.

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.

I have to compliment the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane because, in reality, it’s a lot easier to speak for an hour on a bill that you oppose than it is to speak on one that you actually support, because there’s a whole lot more on a bill that you are opposing. And we are grateful that you are supporting this bill because we know it’s a good piece of legislation. No piece of legislation is necessarily perfect, but this one does hit a lot of the right marks.

You talked a little about—well, no, you talked a lot about it; I’m only going to talk about it for a few seconds—the extension and the expansion of the powers and the authority of a veterinary technician. You’re a rural member and you talked about the vastness of rural and northern Ontario. That change, what kind of real, positive impacts is that going to have for people who are in the practice of agriculture in your neck of the woods, in their ability to get veterinary help when it’s needed?

I want to thank the member for Humber River–Black Creek for his address to the assembly today.

I was intrigued by the letter of former mayors—none of them running for mayor today. All of them, with the exception of David Crombie, would have credentials that are anything but Progressive Conservative or Conservative—but David Crombie has certainly identified himself as otherwise recently. David Miller was one of the first proponents of a strong mayor, and now, of course, every one of them would be signing on most enthusiastically to anything that was opposing Premier Doug Ford. This is their mantra: “It’s Doug Ford, so we will oppose it.”

What Doug Ford stands for is building 1.5 million homes in the province of Ontario, and by having the strong mayors, that is going to accelerate and break down some of the barriers.

I’ve got to tell you, the NDP love to take these positions—“There are other ways to build homes.” Every time there’s a protest against a development, if it’s against the developer, the local NDP member will be right there, along with those protesters against the development. They say they want to build things, too, but every time there is an opportunity to be against building, the NDP are there. That’s not how we’re going to get 1.5 million homes built—