I just want to thank the member from Durham for his speech. It was short but to the point. The member in front of me, he gets it. We all ran to get things done for Ontario, and this legislation is just another step in fulfilling our promise to Ontarians about good government, good fiscal responsibility and a plan to build.

As I mentioned earlier to the member for Sudbury, we talked about fiscal responsibility and fiscal responsibility as we’re building key infrastructure like schools, hospitals, transit, renovating Ontario Place—which is so exciting, to see that Ontario Place is going to be rebuilt. I drive by it every day, and I see the rust on all the buildings, so that’s something that’s very important to our community and all of Ontario as a whole.

My question for our member here in front of me is, can you tell me a little about how this legislation will help cut red tape and make things more efficient for government?

I want to welcome my good friend Norm Miller back to Queen’s Park. Let me tell you that we miss you. You were here for over 20 years. You were here for the whole time that I was here—his riding is just below my riding—and it was a pleasure working with you. I hope you’re enjoying your time in retirement from politics, but I know that you’ve stayed really, really busy.

It was a pleasure to talk about this bill when Norm first brought it forward, and it is just as much a pleasure to talk about this bill this time. This is something that we wholeheartedly support.

I was just talking to my colleague, who said, “I’m surprised this is not the law already.” You can go anywhere, on any docks, on any waterfront, and ask Ontarians, and most of us think that this is already the law, but it is not.

We are legislators. We have a chance to change this today. This is a change that I guarantee you will save lives.

The member went through a lot of statistics, but the statistics really tell the story of real people who lost loved ones, who lost their lives, simply because they were not wearing a life jacket.

I want to quote—“there were 54 boating fatalities in Ontario. According to the OPP, life jackets could have been the difference in 42 of those drownings.” Let this sink in a bit: 54 boating fatalities; 42 could have been prevented had people been wearing a life jacket. They were either not wearing a life jacket or not wearing them properly.

My colleague Gilles Bisson was here when we first debated that bill. He shared with us the story of his father. Gilles’s family has had a camp—what the people in the south call a cottage, we up north call a camp. It’s beautiful, on a beautiful body of water. The lake he’s on has tons of fish. So, like many northerners, after supper, you go for a boat ride and you go for a fish, and you go fishing. His dad was 600 feet from the dock in the boat that he had been in for years and years and years. He fell off the boat while he was catching a big one and drowned.

In the case of Gilles Bisson’s father, he had a life jacket but a 40-year-old life jacket that had been bought for kids, not for adults, and that basically was way past its best-before date. So not only is it important for all of us when we’re in a boat to wear a life jacket, it is important to make sure that they’re not extremely old and they are fit for our size and weight, which was not the case for Gilles Bisson’s father.

We’ve also seen, and this is directly linked to the COVID pandemic—every child who goes to school in Ontario has to take swimming lessons, and a child needs to learn how to swim. But with COVID and with the school closures and the online learning, a lot of kids missed those swimming lessons. We’re talking about three years of kids. We know many more of them now do not know how to swim. They are telling us, the Lifesaving Society report—preliminary research says that there has been a 13% increase in drownings amongst children since 2020. That’s because of less children knowing how to swim.

We should make sure that not only do we pass this bill and make it mandatory for every child under the age of 12 to wear a life jacket when they’re in a boat, but that we go back and look at those three cohorts of children who did not have a chance to take swimming lessons through the school, make sure it doesn’t matter if they age out of that particular school year. Let’s make sure that they have an opportunity to learn how to swim, because learning how to swim is also a good way to prevent drowning.

But back to the bill: Like everybody else here, I always thought that it was the law. When I was in university, I worked in a big national park, teaching people how to canoe. We would have people from all over the world, mainly Americans coming to Canada, to the national park, and we would teach them how to canoe. I didn’t know at the time; I thought it was the law, but it was in the regulations of the national park that everybody, the minute they came onto the dock, no matter their age, had to wear a life jacket. So for my entire life, I have been saying to everybody who gets in a boat, “No, no, it’s the law. You have to wear a life jacket.”

Like 18% of the people in Nickel Belt, I live on a lake. We have many boats, and we have many docks, and nobody comes onto the docks without wearing a life jacket. It’s as simple as that. If you intend to go into the boat, you put your life jacket on. I have three kids and seven grandkids. If the grandkids are not old enough to know how to swim, in the summer, I don’t let them get out of the car without putting a life jacket on them. They keep their life jacket on for the entire day, because we live on a lake, and you never know when a two-year-old or a three-year-old is going to take off at the end of this dock and jump in, which pretty much all of them have done at one point or another because they saw a turtle go by and they wanted to touch it, and in they go, etc.

So this is kind of the law in my backyard, but I thought, when I told this to everyone, I was telling the truth. Now since Norm brought this bill forward, I realized that it is not the law that people have to wear a life jacket when they’re in a boat, but I certainly hope that we use today’s opportunity to change this.

I also like the fact that there are provisions in there for people who row. I don’t know if you knew I’m a competitive rower. When you are rowing, there’s not much room for life jackets, but we have special life jackets that we tie around our waist with a little string and when you flip, which happens lots with rowers, all you have to do is pull it and it goes on. The only exceptions that I would say to this is when you are racing, you want as little weight as you can in your boat, even if it’s a boat with two, four, eight people. But when you’re racing, there’s always a safety boat that follows you. So as long as there’s a safety boat that follows you and the conversation has been had with Row Ontario, I would be comfortable with letting competitive rowers or kayakers or canoeists go without a life jacket if there is a rescue boat that follows them. But if there isn’t, there is such a good variety of life jackets that exist right now that, as I said, even for rowers, we have life jackets—same thing with canoes, same thing with kayaks—that are very light. I use them at home. There is no reason not to wear a life jacket.

For this particular bill, it would be for people 12 years of age and under, but I can tell you that the fact that we will make sure that every child wears a life jacket will have an impact on their siblings and on their parents. It is a whole lot easier to convince a cranky five-, six-, seven-year-old to wear a life jacket when you are wearing one yourself. So for every parent who has been there before, trying to convince their kid to wear a helmet to go for a bike ride, it is a whole lot easier, if Grandma puts her helmet on, to convince your grandchild to put his helmet on to go for a bike ride. The same thing will happen with the life jackets. And the more people wearing life jackets, the more lives will be saved.

I appreciate the member sharing all of the statistics. Drownings are real. The percentage of people, young people, people under the age of 12, who drown every year could be brought down immensely if, today, we pass second reading. But like the member said, I hope that this bill will see third reading and will become enacted in Ontario. Pretty much every state in the United States has laws, either for 12-year-olds—some are 14-year-old and down. It exists in many, many other jurisdictions, and it works. It saves lives.

We have an opportunity here today to save the lives of children. I cannot see how somebody could be voting that down. I know that Norm had done a ton of work before bringing this bill forward. He also had a few interns who worked on this bill. The body of evidence is strong. Let’s pass this bill.