Oh, I’m just getting started. In Arkell—Arkells is a band in Hamilton, right?

Interjection.

Then there’s—I’m sure everybody can guess what they study here—Bradford. I bet you the Minister of Colleges knows what they do at Bradford. They do research on vegetable crops. Who would have thought? Who would have thought they do research on that? But they do.

Cedar Springs: That’s 25 kilometres from Chatham. I’ve never been there, actually. I’ve been to Chatham, but not to Cedar Springs. There, 16 acres are used for crops, mainly apple orchards, but lately they’ve gone to hazelnut and ginger.

About 200 different crops are grown in Ontario. We hear that once in a while. It’s really important. In the agri-food sector, I believe there are close to 800,000 people working in it. It’s big. It’s one and two with cars, and you can’t eat cars. I wish that was my line, but it’s not.

Elora has got a few. There are some really big research stations in Elora: the beef station, the dairy; the swine was just opened. There’s also 400 acres of crops. I’ll give credit where credit is due: The current government has put a lot of funds into Elora, as have the commodity organizations. If you go to the beef or particularly the dairy—I know dairy; I’ve been in dairy my whole life—you’ll see some of the most modern facilities in the world at the Elora station.

I think generally the goal of research in years past has been to increase production, and that’s still the goal. But now there’s also a focus on minimizing impact to the climate, so minimizing your carbon footprint, protecting other resources: water, soil.

I didn’t have time in the tribute to our former minister, Minister Riddell, but actually his focus when he was minister—what he wanted his focus to be—was on foreign ownership of land, which is still a big deal, and soil erosion. But as often is the case in political life, those two issues kind of went—not by the wayside, but the focus on those two issues—when farmers were losing their farms to the banks, they weren’t as worried about soil erosion or foreign ownership.

Quite frankly, in Mr. Riddell’s time, he got lots of criticism. I think the current Tory government will feel for this. The former minister had lots of criticism because he opposed farmers selling pieces of their farms. We, on our farm—we had separate farms, but we had to sell pieces of our farm to keep the main one running. But if you had to sever a piece of your farm, he was opposed to that. That was, then, controversial, as it was very controversial when the current government put out a policy that they were going to allow three severances per farm lot. And guess what? They didn’t have to rescind that one. That one didn’t actually get fully to the light of day, I don’t think. But it’s a case where current events overtake the long-term goals of the industry.

So it’s safe to say that Elora, getting back to the—what are we talking about? Oh, ARIO—getting back to talking about that.

Interjections.

But the focus on Elora—I think it’s obvious that it’s livestock-focused. There was some controversy over Elora as well, because we used to have—and I’m going to get to it later—beef research in New Liskeard, and they moved the cows from New Liskeard to Elora—or moved the research. But if you really think about it, and especially the previous government, the current government talking about, “The future of the beef industry is in northern Ontario,” then you would think that the future of beef research would be in northern Ontario, because I’ll guarantee you that not everything that works in Elora works in my colleague’s riding of Kapuskasing. So that was a bit of a controversial move. There are some things that work. I’m not saying that you can’t do research, that all research has to be done where you want the industry, but some things make sense, so that’s still a bit of a head-scratcher that that was so centralized.

But I do believe that Beef Farmers of Ontario were in favour at the time, so I’m not criticizing them. They know more about raising beef than I do, so there could very well have been good reasons for that, but locally, we are still scratching our heads. You would think that beef research should be moving north as opposed to moving south—but that’s a whole different ball of wax.

There’s one, and I’ve been to this one; I bet you not too many other people have: Emo. We have a research station in Emo. That’s a long ways away from here. There’s a movie, I think, called Finding Nemo. I bet you more of you could find Nemo than find Emo.

Interjections.