I hail from the riding of Kitchener South–Hespeler, which is, as they will all agree, a somewhat uneasy political union of the south part of Kitchener and Hespeler. Kitchener South contains a variety of residential neighbourhoods as well as a wonderful museum and gallery and the village of Doon. Hespeler, if you ask Hespeler, contains the entire world, and it more or less ends there. I know anybody watching from home from Hespeler will agree with me that they are certainly not part of Kitchener South, nor are they part of Cambridge, and frankly, I love them for that attitude.

The people of Kitchener South–Hespeler are the first ones I have to thank because they are the ones who put me here. Without all of you voting for me—I know I do have some of you watching from home, thank you, including my arborist, who just messaged me to say he’s in a tree; I hope he is. We won’t tell the Minister of Labour. The people of Kitchener South–Hespeler are the ones who voted for me. They are the ones who put me here. Without all of them, I would not have the ability to be saying anything that I’m saying; I wouldn’t have the ability to do anything for these people. I will never take lightly the trust that they put in me. I am eternally grateful to the people of Kitchener South–Hespeler.

I also have to say thank you to Amy Fee. Amy Fee was the MPP for Kitchener South–Hespeler before me, and she is a thoroughly lovely person. Amy has four kids and three service dogs, and two of her children are on the autism spectrum. She has been and always will be an absolute champion for the autism cause. While I was campaigning, she was never more than a phone call away. I could always be assured of a response from her—“Jess, you’ve got this.”

A parliamentarian’s inaugural speech—of course, I did look it up; I looked in the legislative library—is an opportunity to say thank you, to introduce yourself etc. I thought a lot about how best to structure this speech. I thought about what I wanted to say and who I wanted to thank. I thought about which section should go where. Ultimately, I thought so much about my speech that I never really quite got around to writing it and it’s mostly just notes. So if I ramble, my apologies in advance.

Standing here at the moment, I’ve decided to start with what I think is the most important part and introduce two of the best people in the world—two people who are, quite literally, the only reason I’m here; two people who have supported me through everything; and, coincidentally, two people who, just yesterday, marked their 40th anniversary together: my parents, Ruth Dixon and Eric Dyke.

There’s a Jann Arden song—it’s actually not one of my favourites, but it’s one that Mom always talks about. It’s called Good Mother, and it has the lines in it, “I like the colour of my hair / I’ve got a friend who loves me / Got a house, I’ve got a car”—but it says “I’ve got a good mother” and “I’ve got a good father.” That is absolutely what I have. I’m an only child, so I was blessed to never have to share them with absolutely anybody else, which I love.

My mom, Ruth, was born in Deep River. She was one of six kids. Her mom, my granny, was a nurse in labour and delivery, and an Irish immigrant. She certainly carried on the nursing tradition because, out of all of her kids, we have four nurses. My mom was an orthopedic and operating room nurse. My auntie Deb is a cardiac nurse. My auntie Moe is an RNFA, a registered nurse first assistant. My auntie Sheila, who we’ve lost, was a geriatric nurse. My auntie Fif did not become a nurse, but she became a registered massage therapist and a practitioner of eastern medicine. My uncle Dave was the black sheep and went off and became an engineer or something like that.

Dad was born in Vancouver, one of three brothers. Both of his brothers became skilled mechanics. My dad also was the black sheep and went off and became an engineer or something like that.

My parents met when my dad was a summer student at Chalk River. Admittedly, I get a little bit confused about the chronology after that, because they met at Chalk River, and then there was a period when mom was on a kibbutz and she was an au pair in Paris. My dad ended up on a sheep farm, either in New Zealand or Australia, and has the kangaroo whip to prove it. But somehow or other, they did get back together—luckily for me, or I wouldn’t be here.

I’m known for having a stubborn streak a mile wide and being very into DIY, and I came by that honestly. Barely a month before I was born, my parents bought a lovely arts and crafts bungalow in Victoria, BC—which came very cheap because it was scheduled for imminent demolition—which they cut in half and put on two giant flatbed moving trucks and took through downtown Victoria, just in time to welcome me home to a massive construction site, in a laundry basket with a sheepskin in it. We more or less put the final stitch in that house before picking up everything and moving to Ontario, due to the death of the manufacturing sector in Victoria.

My dad got a job at Babcock, now known as BWXT, and Mom started to work at McMaster hospital. My dad went on to Aecon, becoming the project manager for their N-Stamp project, which is attaining safety certification to produce nuclear components—which I never thought would be relevant, because I never thought I’d be a politician, and I never thought I would be the parliamentary assistant for energy, but here we are.

Mom went back to school and became a manager at Cambridge Memorial Hospital—same-day surgery, the OR, the ER, the fracture clinic etc. She retired and then came out of retirement to be a coordinator for CCAC. She retired again, and then she came out of retirement again when COVID hit, and she brought her nursing skills back to Ontario.

Why did I get involved in politics? I never wanted to be a politician. It never occurred to me that I’d be here. If you had told me two or three years ago that I would be here, I’d be very startled. It begins with a house and a job, as well as a day at work that was both good and bad, and, surprisingly, a bag of milk.

I’ll just begin: I’m a crown attorney. I’ve been a crown attorney both federally and provincially. My mom has a report card from preschool where my preschool teacher wrote, “Jess has a very clearly defined sense of right and wrong”—and that seems to have stuck with me. I articled with the crown attorney in Ottawa, and I loved my job as a crown ever since I first walked into the halls.

In 2015, in Cambridge, I bought a foreclosure that I’m still working on at a rate that appalls my project manager father, because the projects that get done are the only ones that seem interesting at the time. At any rate, in the course of working on that house, I met my neighbour.

My house is in an area that has a large swath of geared-to-income single-family housing in it. As I would be working on my house, I would notice my neighbour Laura walking by. She was a single mom with, at the time, a 13-year-old and a one-year-old. We eventually got to chatting. Basically, she’s somebody who doesn’t have a lot, and she was just loving living vicariously through me making this very, very ugly house, day by day, a little bit more attractive. We started to talk more, and her older daughter, Lauryn, would come over. One day Lauryn was helping me in the garden, and we started talking about school, and I realized that Lauryn, even though she had just graduated grade eight in Ontario—she was born in Ontario—had no conception that college or university was something that applied to her. I went to a private school; I didn’t know about the applied versus academic streaming. Lauryn had been put into applied, and I was absolutely appalled that somebody would make that decision for her and limit her in that fashion. I ended up marching into her school, tailing Laura behind me, and having her moved into academic and into a different school entirely. I’m proud to say that she has just finished her first year of occupational therapy at Georgian College.

As the little one, Caprea, Laura’s other daughter, got older, she—again, Laura is not somebody who has a lot. She is somebody who should have been on ODSP but wasn’t. I ended up helping her with that application and going through the Byzantine process—particularly for somebody who deals with brain injury, when you have an invisible disability. As Caprea, the little one, got older, I started realizing her language development skills were falling behind a little bit, but I always knew that she was a really smart little girl. At school, they seem to have just written her off. The idea seemed to be that if she acted up in class, they would just take her to a different room. Frankly, she’s smart as a whip. She figured out very quickly that if she acted up, she didn’t have to do the work, and she immediately left the room. So I ended up putting Caprea into Kumon, into math and English tutoring, and, ultimately, into swimming and into karate. She is a very smart little girl. She’s doing wonderfully in Kumon; she has been in it for probably three years now. This is a little girl who is never going to fall through the cracks. She has been given a start that she wouldn’t have had otherwise.

When I was a crown, I would talk to a lot of accused people. When you’re a crown, you’re supposed to want to be up in the glamorous courts, the Superior Court. I always loved being in the workhorse courts where you’re dealing one on one with accused people. As time went on, I started pursuing more and more of my own alternative justice measures. I would have some pretty good successes. I have a lot of different stories. One of the ones that always comes to mind was when I was in St. Thomas, and I ended up talking to a man, a boy—I’ll change his name; I think he's 20—named Matthew. At the time, he was living in his car. He had been charged with two counts of driving without insurance because he was sleeping in his uninsured car. His family had kicked him out because he had a cocaine addiction. He had managed to finish high school, but that was about it. So he was facing a drug charge; he was facing a property crime charge; he was facing two counts of driving without insurance, which is a $10,000 minimum fine. This is somebody who was on the precipice of a downward spiral.

I talked to him and I said, “Look, I’m the prosecutor, you don’t have to talk to me, but I’m interested in hearing how you got here.” He talked to me and he told me about some of his struggles from home. This is all happening over the phone; it’s still COVID. And so I said, “Okay, you’ve got yourself in a lot of trouble here, but I am most interested in seeing about how we can make it that you never come back here again.”

I told him to go off and to start seeing—I was like, “Okay, the first thing is, let’s see if you can get back in with your parents.” So I set him up with some counselling options, which I had to look around to find. Over the months that I adjourned his case, he moved back in with his parents. He met a girl. Because he’d finished high school, I’d started talking to him—technically I knew I was probably going to run, but I still wasn’t thinking about it that much—and I told him a lot about the trades. By the end of my time with him—a lot of the time, being a crown is sort of being somebody’s cheerleader and their mom at the same time. And by the end, he had moved into his own apartment with his girlfriend, and he was officially signed up as an apprentice at Fanshawe.

I told him at the end, “I’m withdrawing your charges, because you’ve done what I wanted you to do to never be back here,” and he sobbed on the phone to me and said that I was the only person that had ever really believed in him or taken the time to speak to him—

Interjections.

Thank you. And the thing is that he was just one of many. I have had that experience over and over and over again, of being a person that took the unconventional approach, the person that listened.

The thing with him or the thing with my neighbour and my neighbour’s daughters is that they’re not going to fall through the cracks. They are protected. But what increasingly bothered me more and more was that the only common element in that—this is not to pat myself on the back; this is why I became involved—was me. If they hadn’t come across me as the crown or me as their busybody, interfering neighbour, that wouldn’t have happened. And I felt that in a province like Ontario, that simply wasn’t good enough.

I firmly believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. I believe that that is what this party stands for. It stands for investing in people early on, in giving people the tools that they need to build themselves up. But I wanted to be able to be here and tell stories like the story that I just told so that you understand what it’s like for people that live in this different world, in this far more disorganized world, and know that they’re not past hope. They’re not past help. And we can absolutely do a great deal for them. And that is, in large part, why I ran: in order to be here.

To finish this off, in my last few days—I’ll get to the bag of milk, actually. I had had both a good day and a bad day at work. It was a good day because I’d had yet another full-grown man sobbing, in happiness, on the phone to me, and I had made a really, really big difference in his life. I was happy about it, but I was also frustrated because I thought, I know that there’s not very many people that are doing what I’m doing, so I’m having an incredibly small impact right now, even though I’ve had major impact on this one man.

My mother was over, and I was saying, “I don’t know. What do you do if you want to make things better? If I have influence, but it’s very small, do you go into politics?” And she said, “Well, you know, it could be something to consider.” And then she left, and she went to the grocery store to get a bag of milk. And while she was at the grocery store, she saw a gentleman, John Wright, who is sort of a local businessman, and she distantly recalled seeing him on Facebook, in perhaps a Conservative Party function locally. So she went up to John and asked him if he had any party involvement and said, “Jess just wants to talk to somebody about it.”

John is the type of person that does everything at just 100 miles an hour. So before the next day was even finished, he had two people that were involved locally, Mike Dearden and Peter Tudisco, and had arm-wrestled them into calling his random friend’s daughter who had a slight interest in politics.

They were really the originators. Peter Tudisco and Mike Dearden were the ones that took this away. If it weren’t for them, I absolutely would not be here. They made this happen. I was working full-time as a crown attorney, caring for a very, very ill dog at that point, and they were the ones that absolutely did this, while also having a wonderful sense of humour about it.

Mike will be watching this, and I feel entitled—because I have 20 minutes to talk—I have a phone full of text messages from Mike with no response from me, of us being at events with him sending me a message that says, “Wrap it up, Jess. Wrap it up. Okay, you’ve talked too much.”

I also want to thank Jim Schmidt. Jim was the candidate for Kitchener Centre. He unfortunately did not win but is just an absolutely stand-up guy. He was one of my main touchstones during the entire campaign process. We’d meet for lunch regularly. He was always the one who actually knew what date things were due, how to get the phone and who’s email I was supposed to have, and then he would also comment that he would really appreciate it if he could see me eat a vegetable once in a while—he still hasn’t.

I also want to thank Brandon Lukach, who’s another one of my neighbours. Actually he’s another part of that neighbourhood. Brandon is somebody that dropped out of school when he was in grade 10 due to a combination of circumstances, and I’m proud to say that we got him to successfully write his GED back in March and now he will be on to bigger and brighter things. I’m very proud of him for that.

I also want to talk about Joe and Corey Kimpson. When I started doing social media for my campaign, I came across this business, a paintball field called Flag Raiders that I remembered was closed down. I reached out to them to say, “Look, I’ve got about as much power as a goldfish in an empty bowl, but I’m happy to come talk to you and see what’s happening.”

I went out to the field and I just had this immediate—I don’t know—connection with the two of them, but particularly with Corey Kimpson. We talked about paintball, we talked about local businesses. I think maybe one week later, she sent me a package about Flag Raiders and then not even a week after that, our next connection was me sending her a panicked message, asking if she knew anybody at the Rotary because I had just been asked to go to a Rotary gala that started in two hours. She wrote back, “I think I know some people.” Then I wrote back, “Will you go with me?” So she was my date at a Rotary gala with two hours’ notice, having only ever spoken to me once before. Her and Joe put up signs. They managed my social media. They were just incredible.

I also want to talk about—I call them my Holy Trinity. I know that some of them are watching. Angie, Monica and Marie are three wonderful ladies. I met Angie through Facebook. Monica was one of the only people that responded to one of our riding-wide emails, and Marie was a person who came out to one of our events. I remember being so incredibly touched, the first time we had a super canvass when Marie came out and gave her time to me because I was never expecting somebody I didn’t know that didn’t owe me anything would turn up. But those three did and they turned up over and over and over again, and I absolutely owe them.

My aunts, my nurse aunts, Auntie Deb and Auntie Moe, would come out as well. Carl—reliable Carl and Tyler, who, when they came, I knew with a breath of relief that we would at least probably finish this canvass. And Rob Elliott—Rob was a regional organizer, and he came in in the last 10 days of the campaign to get us over the finish line—just an absolute ray of sunshine. He came on after, again, to help me set up the office, and if it weren’t for him, all of my phones would still be tin cans on strings.

Anyway I owe so many people: Megan, TJ, Alide, Bill, David, Lauryn, Jenn, Max and Chris, but I want to end this again by saying thank you to my parents.

I’m a philosophy major—again, courtesy of my mother. I credit being an open-minded person to having the experience of being in a Nietzsche 101 class when you’re 18 years old and you think you have all the right opinions. You put your hand up and you’re immediately torn apart by a bunch of philosophy students that are, frankly, much better informed than you are.

What that taught me was the value of intellectual humility, and it’s something that we would do well to have more of, and certainly of politicians, which is the courage to be wrong, the courage to even look for the reasons why we are wrong. And that is something that I feel unashamed to commit to. I’m not scared to be wrong. I’m not scared to look for the reasons I’m wrong. But if I’m right, I will be right.

I have a number of memories of times where I have been very certain that I was right about something, but in taking the time to listen I realized that I was either wrong or simply coming at it from the wrong direction. I rarely ever regretted asking somebody to expand further on their story.

Report continues in volume B.