I’m pleased to ask the member who serves very, very well as the critic for labour—and I want to ask the member from Sudbury about the staffing shortage in the hospitals and what we’ve been talking about a lot in this room, but certainly talking about it in our communities, about nurses leaving good union jobs that used to be well-paying, that have benefits and protections, full-time hours. They are leaving those jobs in droves to go to private, sometimes fly-by-night agencies. I guess I don’t understand that, because obviously the protections in good union jobs—that’s something people aspire to. Can you talk to me maybe about the working conditions, or what the conditions are that would make them consider that or maybe even make them feel forced to do that?

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 to the member for Toronto Centre.

Over the last four years, one of the things I was surprised by, as an MPP, was how little consultation we have with the public, that many things we discuss—and, I would argue, maybe everything we discuss—become time-allocated; that when we have public consultation, it is always five hours, the minimum allowed.

My background is in health and safety—there’s a bunch of different stuff, but health and safety is really my passion. I’ve learned over the last 17 years of doing that job that you don’t have to have all the answers. What you need to do is, you need to sit down with the people who are being affected, and they’ll give you the answers—and some of the answers we know already. Do you know how you solve housing? You build houses, affordable ones—not giant ones—public housing. That’s how you solve that.

Do you know how you get food to people? You give them affordable food. You give them enough money so they can make ends meet.

Those are the solutions.

But really, what we need to do is what we’re elected to do: to listen to our constituents, to tour, to talk to them and make good decisions, even if they don’t agree with what we thought we believed before we came there—to make decisions based on what people are telling us is the best thing to do.

It’s a weird thing, because it’s a yes/and conversation—it isn’t Highway 69 or Highway 413. I’ve looked at the data for Highway 413 because I was the northern infrastructure critic, and it doesn’t bear fruit; you can say that it does, and the Liberals tried saying it did before, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t reduce commute times. Really, if you want to go forward with that, if that’s what the constituents want in southern Ontario, more power to you. I would disagree about the strength of it. What I am saying is, don’t do it instead of Highway 69. On Highway 69, people are dying. People are being killed. Someone was killed in the last 15 days. I’ve been here before several times talking about people who were killed on Highway 69. So if we’re going to do either/or, let’s stop where people are being killed and let’s then do the next one—and if it’s going to be a yes/and, then let’s do both. But at the end of the day, let’s get Highway 69 done. If you really, really, really want 413, you have the power to drive that through. We can disagree about it—but what I’m talking about is that we have an area where people are being killed on the highway, and we need to support them and ensure that stops happening.

I talked a lot about Bill 124 in the debate, and my colleagues have talked about Bill 124. It’s a bad bill, and it’s punishing. The result of it, really, at the end of the day, is, even though the Conservative government stands up and says that these are heroes and role models and stuff, they’re not being treated like heroes; they’re not being treated like the best. There’s a quality of life that you want. You want to feel fulfilled about your job.

Let’s be honest. If somebody were to tell you to explain what it’s like to be an MPP—there are long hours, and we work hard; there are a lot of people who think that we don’t, but we do, and I know my colleagues opposite do as well. Why do we do it? Because we’re inspired and we enjoy it and it fulfills us.

As health care workers, when you’re being treated by the government as if you’re not valuable and not important, you exit those jobs.

In Sudbury, we have a supervised consumption site that we are waiting for an announcement of the provincial funding for—which, fingers crossed, is happening this week; I’ve heard a rumor, but to be honest, at the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a visit to evaluate it.

For four years, I’ve been talking about the opioid crisis in Sudbury—across northern Ontario, but in Sudbury in particular, because it’s my riding and where I see it the most. There’s a major intersection in Sudbury with a sea of white crosses, and it is sad that I have to count them to see how many there are on a regular basis. The number continues to grow. That only signifies the people who agree to put crosses up.

We need to inject money into people to be successful. The idea of quitting on your own and just magically overcoming this doesn’t make sense. The government can really, really help by an investment into mental health and addictions to help with aftercare, to help with beds, to help with addiction recovery.

The member spoke quite passionately about another crisis that is going on in this province, and that’s the opioid crisis. I’ve seen, and I know the member has seen, so many crosses—the white crosses that we see in many of our communities across northern Ontario. Actually, in a couple of weeks I’ll be participating in a community walk—where we have another beautiful young person who succumbed to the opioid crisis. Week after week, those numbers keep getting elevated.

We have these buildings where individuals go and get the treatment they need, but it’s the aftercare that is not being provided to them. They’re being subjected to going back to the environment that they were in, and they slip back into that routine. That aftercare, that continuum of care is so needed, and we need to make those investments if we’re going to get on top of the opioid crisis.

I’d like to hear from the member: What do you see, as far as the Sudbury area, northern Ontario, that is absolutely needed to battle the opioid crisis?

Next question.

Questions?

I want to tell the member, your inaugural speech was amazing. You say you ramble—you can ramble all you want in this House. It’s going to be welcome.

You would have shamed the previous member from Bruce–Grey–Owen Sound. He used to go, go, go, but you would just put him in his place today. For those that have listened to Bill Walker when he was in this House—he would always have a good time with us in this House.

Listen, you’ve demonstrated that your experience through getting here, you have heart and compassion. That’s something that many of us have in this Legislature—all of us have in this Legislature. We’ve all have those stories. I remember meeting up with Januzhe Pochwalowski. He was an immigrant who came to Canada. He was having so many problems raising his two boys—nobody would listen to him. He kept saying, “Listen, there’s something wrong with my pension. There’s something wrong with my pension.” I listened to him. I heard him. We looked at his pension and managed to deal with WSIB. We found out that he had not been indexed. I called him into the office and said, “I have some bad news for you. You know those years of pension you were entitled to that didn’t come? They’re coming. You’re going to be getting $186,000.” And it was just something that we do.

As an opposition, we are critical of this government. We will criticize the government. We will oppose. That’s our job. My question to you will be, will you be hearing to respond to the opposition or will you be listening to understand the points that we’re bringing across?

Question?

The honourable member from Kitchener South–Hespeler obviously, in eight years as a crown prosecutor, was not just prosecuting people, but was working with people. She obviously understood the clarion call of former Chief Justice Brian Dickson, who said we must have both law and compassion, because a prosecutor is not just prosecuting, but listening to people, an officer of the court serving the people.

Now, in this new role of being a member of provincial Parliament and having gone through a campaign, what would the honourable member say would be her top highlights of dealing with people, both on the campaign trail and since her election on June 2?

Thank you, Speaker, and thank you as well to my colleague from across the aisle, who had a really great speech. I liked that you started and ended it with your mom and dad, and I liked the phrase you said about mostly just notes. I’m going to ask you a question, but if you prefer, if there’s something in your notes you didn’t get to speak about, just say, “I wanted to bring this up,” because sometimes you have that feeling when you sit down, when you wanted to mention someone’s name.

I was just wondering if, newly elected, anything stood out to you—it’s been about two months now—from the time of your election to today that you didn’t really expect, or that surprised you, or that you found interesting after being elected.

Congratulations to the member opposite on an excellent inaugural speech. I actually listened with a lot of interest, especially as you were describing your background as a crown prosecutor. I can only imagine some of the situations that you’ve been in, especially in those courtrooms trying to do right by the person that you’re representing or the situation that you’re in.

I was actually just quickly doing some calculations based on things that I’ve learned in my community of Toronto Centre. And what I’ve learned in Toronto Centre is that there’s a disproportionate number of Indigenous people who are incarcerated or perhaps held in correctional facilities, and yet their actual population size in Ontario is actually pretty small. And I’ll just give you a quick example: 31% of Indigenous adults are in custody, yet they only represent 4.5% of the population. Indigenous youth are 43% held in correctional facilities, and yet they only represent 8.8% of the population.

I think that if I was to drill down a little bit deeper into, basically, what you said, you were talking about your individual efforts of working within the system to help people. I’m curious to know your position and your values on how it would translate to changing the system, the structural deficiencies that we see in the system, so we can actually help people by changing the systemic problems that are here, that keep the Indigenous population in correctional facilities or incarcerated. How would you bring that type of thinking to the House?

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.

Having gotten to know my colleague a little bit over the last while—obviously, energy galore, very talented. Eight years as crown prosecutor, both federally and provincially, alternative justice—you’ve shared some really interesting stories. You’re compassionate about it and you’ve shown results. But family first—that’s obviously important to you. Tell us a little more about your dad.