It adds more than flavour to it, that’s for sure.

The standard now is ABS pipe for waste water. What we have here is cast iron, and it’s wrapped with horsehair. When the cast iron breaks, obviously the horsehair gets all wet as well, and it causes a real problem cleaning it up, but it’s in places now where you can’t even get to it.

One of the good parts I’ll say about the age of the building is, we didn’t use asbestos in 1893, so they’re probably not going to find a lot of asbestos when they tear this down, but we don’t know. That’s why it’s going to take close to 10 years for this building to be decanted and then rebuilt. There are so many unknowns when they start taking down the walls, and they have to do it in a way that is going to preserve some of the fantastic, historical artwork that is here.

But it’s not just the physical aspects of the building. There are other things that this building can be used for to represent all of Ontario.

At one of the committee meetings, there was a discussion around art and what art should be here and what should be displayed and what art perhaps shouldn’t be displayed. As the member from Oshawa talked about, there’s some very dark art that’s here. She has said to me a couple of times that one of the pieces of art right beside the member from Sudbury’s office—it’s called The Foreclosure, and you have a farmer who is lying on his deathbed with his family around, and you have the banker foreclosing on the farm because the farmer is too sick to continue on. That is a piece of art that we have here. It’s worth keeping—it’s worth reminding ourselves, because those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it.

So, as we put this back together, we have to make sure that we’re putting in all of those things that remind us not only of the good things that have happened in Ontario, but also some of those dark things that have happened in Ontario. As legislators, one of our jobs is to improve the lives of the people we represent, and the only way we can be assured that we are doing those things is by thinking of and recognizing the mistakes that had been made in the past and not repeating those mistakes. So it’s very, very important that as we put the building back together, we’re putting in those types of things that do remind us of not only the good things that have happened in Ontario, but also some of the darker history in Ontario.

Decisions are going to have to be made on all of that, and the only way that we can make that decision appropriately is to make sure that we have the appropriate feedback from everybody.

I did love the one comment that was made by the Minister of Northern Development and Minister of Indigenous Affairs about the possibility of travelling the Legislature, and what I’ll point out is that, in British Columbia, I had the opportunity to go to the BC Legislature, and they actually did that for the 100-year anniversary. They went back to the original city that served as the capital city and they turned the hockey rink into the Legislature for seven days. So it’s been done before in Canada. That would be a great opportunity for us to take, and I would love, more than anything else, to use the 900,000 square feet of GE in Peterborough and bring the Legislature to Peterborough for a week.

If you recall, when the Seven Grandfather Teachings was put up, there was a smudging ceremony that went on. I would love to see something like that at the beginning of each of our sessions, having a smudging ceremony, because it’s cleansing your mind, your eyes, your ears, your nose, your mouth and your heart. If we were to do something like that to incorporate some of those traditions—not just the physical part of it, but actually some of the things that are done as a ceremony for different reasons by different groups across Ontario. I’d love to see something like that incorporated in what we do.

There are different technologies that we have today that can be incorporated into the building of the building of this building—say “building” three times—that allows for flexibility in the future because it’s easy to remove and put back and no one would know that it had been removed. Having that type of flexibility I think is something we should be looking at.