The member from Algoma–Manitoulin talked quite a bit at the beginning of his speech about farms and farmland. The dairy farmers are here at Queen’s Park today; I encourage you to go and visit them. He has a big dairy operation in Algoma–Manitoulin, Farquhar’s Dairy. They need land to have pastures for those cows that give us the milk, that feed the people of northern Ontario, including in my riding. Farquhar’s is a very well-loved milk producer.

I was wondering if the member could share with us the importance of listening to farmers. They are the ones who feed our communities, who feed our cities. They were not listened to. I would be curious to see what the member has to say about that.

Speaker, I have tons of respect for the member who just asked the question. We get along. If we would be alone in a room, we’d probably resolve a lot of the things that are debated on the floor of this Legislature.

The comment that I was making is, this government’s own Housing Affordability Task Force that was implemented actually told this government that the lands that are required in order to build additional homes are already available. We don’t need to go onto the greenbelt. That was the point that I was stressing through a lot of my presentation today—there’s already available lands, plenty of room to build on. Let’s use those lands before we go anywhere else or we consider anything else, because putting the greenbelt in harm’s way is going to be a loss forever.

So when the farming community is coming out to the government and saying, “Hey, you should reconsider these actions because they’re going to negatively impact not only me, but the future of the farming community and those who are coming in behind me, like my children who are looking at building their own farms or coming into the field”—and the changes that this government was proposing were going to increase costs on them immensely.