There is a problem. The member from Mushkegowuk–James Bay is heckling his own member, Speaker, but he brings up a very, very good point. It very well may be that Ontario might statistically have the safest roads in North America, but I can guarantee you that Highway 11 north of North Bay is absolutely not the safest road in North America.

So while the food that feeds people—while we transport it across that strip, and the highway is continually closed, it’s a big issue. Health care—the lack of health care, access to health care—is the number one issue in my riding but followed very closely by highway safety. I can tell you, Speaker, that when the OPP put up that post—that info doesn’t come from me; that comes from the northeastern OPP, that almost half the trucks pulled over had to be kept off the road—that didn’t make the residents of northern Ontario feel a lot better, because that’s our main street. That’s our main street.

Before I go to the next research station—we’re almost halfway down the list—I’d just like to—one other statistic about Highway 11. If your car is registered in the district of Timiskaming, so where the New Liskeard Agricultural Research Station is, you are four times as likely to die in an accident on a provincial highway than if it’s registered in Toronto—four times as likely to die, and yet we have to listen to “We have the safest highways in North America.” Again, I give credit where credit’s due. I see that MTO or someone is doing some testing along some of our worst corners because they’re planning on putting in a 2+1. I give credit where credit’s due. The 2+1 is a pilot project that hopefully will make a difference, and if it makes a difference on those 14 kilometres, hopefully they keep going.

But you know what else would make a difference on Highway 11—a big difference—and not just to the people driving regular vehicles, but to truckers? Places to pull off the highway. Like, there’s signs on Highway 11: “Fatigue kills.” But if you’re driving a truck and you’re fatigued, there’s no place to pull off, so what good is the sign? What good is the sign?

We’ve had a terrible year, winter-wise. I think anybody from northern Ontario—it’s been a really weird—

Interjection.

Highway 11: You can’t just pull over on a nice paved shoulder, because there isn’t one. You pull a truck over on Highway 11, and unless you stay on the highway, you’re not getting back on the highway. Everybody knows this, and we all laugh at the people who don’t know this and end up flipping over into the ditch—and this happens a lot. But it’s not wholly that. We need better training for drivers in Ontario or drivers across Canada, no doubt, but we also need better roads.

There are big chunks of Highway 11 that were designed 50, 60 years ago, and there hasn’t really been a big change. They changed the pavement, changed the culverts, but you look at the traffic—I drive around here a lot lately, and there are lots of country roads I drive here, country highways, nice roads. They’re basically as good as Highway 11 except they don’t have 1,800 transports a day. That’s the difference. And it’s just so frustrating. The government has promised, oh, for years, so maybe this is year they actually build rest stops or even parking lots, just a place to pull over.

There are big chunks that—my favourite, and this isn’t in my riding. It might be in the member from Mushkegowuk–James Bay’s. But anyway, when you go from Cochrane and you go west, there’s a big sign. I did this a couple of years ago, so maybe it’s changed now. There’s a big sign that if you need towing, here’s the number you have to call, but there’s no cell service on either side of that sign for a long ways. So again, it’s kind of like “Fatigue Kills,” right?

Now, I think it’s just because—there’s a lot of problems down here. I’m not saying—but it’s the Trans-Canada Highway. It’s the Trans-Canada Highway, and I think we all know that it’s substandard, but we don’t see it every day. But we do; we do. I had an MTO enforcement officer call me. He was talking about the blitz, what they did, and he goes, “Yeah, I spend most of my time in southern Ontario, but when we went on that blitz, you wouldn’t believe the things that happen on Highway 11 north of North Bay.” I said, “Oh, no, we believe, because we live it.” We live it. And that’s something that has to change and something that I’ve been talking about for the last 12 years. Maybe that blitz came because we bothered the minister enough, and that’s what we’re going to keep doing on behalf of the people of Ontario.

Before I go from New Liskeard to—where’s the next one on my list? Oh, Ponsonby. I haven’t even heard of Ponsonby before, but we’re going to talk about Ponsonby. But before I go to Ponsonby, I just want to talk about climate change for a second, because climate change has a lot to do with agriculture. I’m finding this winter has a big impact on all kinds of people, short-term—basically, now we’re having a bit of a winter, but usually our winter starts a lot sooner. There are a lot of people who rely on winter for their livelihood: skidooers, the people who run restaurants, servicing, the people who rent out cabins for skidooers. I have a lot of them in my riding. There was one—I stopped at their place a couple of days ago—the Tomiko restaurant on Highway 11. They put out an urgent call on Facebook: Could people help them out? Because they were just about done.

I stopped in at Temagami Shores. Tomiko has great food. Temagami Shores—great food, great rooms.

Man, it hurts when you don’t have a winter, right? We have to realize those things. I don’t know how we’re going to address that, but changes in climate—and whether you agree on how it’s happening or how quickly it’s happening, it’s happening. If you want to debate me on whether climate change is real, man, I think we’ve got to back up a few steps. But it’s impacting a lot of people, and we’re going to have to come to some kind of—on how we deal with people who are losing their livelihoods through no fault of their own.

It used to be, if you bought a business or you ran a business in northern Ontario, every year is different, but you could kind of depend on winter. The one thing about living in northern Ontario: You can kind of depend on winter. That’s no longer the case.

I was talking to the owner of Canadian Tire in Cochrane. He moved, I believe, from the Woodstock area. I don’t know exactly if it was Canadian Tire in Woodstock, but he moved to Cochrane. When I was kid, we came from the Woodstock area too. And I asked him, “Enlighten me. Why did you pick Cochrane?” There’s a pretty stringent system for Canadian Tires. You just can’t show up. You have to prove your management capability. So I said, “So, why did you move to Cochrane?” And his answer: “Because Cochrane has four seasons. If you stock up on snow shovels in Cochrane, you know you’re going to sell them.” I never really thought about that before. If you have a snowmobile sales shop in Cochrane, you’re pretty sure: “Well, this year, they’ve got snow,” but it’s nip and tuck. That’s not just, “It happens once in a while.” This has never really happened to us at this level. I’m not trying to be the Chicken Little person, but this has never really happened to us at this level.

And I was thinking, too, as someone in agriculture, we haven’t had really the cold weather either in northern Ontario that protects us from a lot of the insects and bugs, right? So, do you know what? The pine beetle might be coming to northern Ontario a lot quicker than we thought, because before, we were protected by cold weather.

So, now, I’m going to get back to ARIO. Ponsonby is a general animal facility, but it specifies—no. Focuses—we’ll use “focuses.”