Dr. Pol.

Dairy cows and yaks are close?

No, at least one.

Yes, because I usually put one or two cow stories in if I’m not talking about agriculture.

There are some common ailments that specifically dairy cows, but all cows can get. Cows have four stomachs, but dairy cows are very prone—because dairy cows are athletes. Dairy cows are athletes. They work very hard. They are attended very well, but they work very hard, and if something goes off balance, they just don’t have a bad day and come back—not often.

One of the things that afflicts dairy cattle—and it’s also partly if you get the feed wrong. There are a couple of things. One of them is called milk fever. When a cow has a calf and they start—and if there are any vets watching this, they’re going to cringe, because my description of how a cow works inside probably isn’t accurate at all. But from a farmer’s perspective, how a cow works is, a cow has a calf and its mammary glands demand calcium, and if there’s a bit of an imbalance, it takes the calcium from its muscles and it gets something called milk fever. It can’t stand up. You can feel them get cold. Everyone has a different way of handling it. I wasn’t very good at intravenous, so I didn’t do it, so we put bottles of calcium under their skin, and that would hold them until the vet came and did intravenous calcium. Most of the time, the cow would get up, but—

Something else that cattle are very prone to, especially if they get milk fever—and I hope the vets give me some latitude here—is twisted stomachs. I hope no one in the Legislature has ever talked about cows’ twisted stomachs before, but I’m—

When I first started farming, the vet would—and you couldn’t tell right away if a cow had a twisted stomach, but you can tell on their faces when they’re not happy, and their ears are cold. As soon as you see ears cold, you know you have to start checking your cow out.

Every farmer had his own something that gets cows’ stomachs activated. It doesn’t just activate my French; it also activates a cow’s stomach: beer. Very strong coffee does, too. If you mix really strong coffee and—I don’t think Hansard will cover hand motions, but you put your arm around the cow, hold their nose up and—

Laughter.

Interjections.

My first vet, Dr. Pierce, retired, and then I went to the Temiskaming vet clinic, and they did it differently. So, when we had a cow with a turned stomach, there’s a way to tie a rope right behind their front legs. If you tie it tight enough, the cow will fall on its side and then you tie the four legs, so the cow is lying prone in the pen.

Anyway, you flip the cow over and then the stomach will go naturally to where it’s supposed to.

They have four stomachs but it’s only the second stomach that causes the trouble. I hope it’s the second stomach; I’m sure a vet will text me and say no, it’s the third or fourth. But anyway, I always thought it was the second.

Then, when they feel that the stomach is in the right place, when they hear it, then they will sew the stomach back in place from the outside, and it’s much less invasive. The cow bounces back much quicker. But it’s not as—how do I put it? It’s a skill to be able to do that. Some have a better knack at it than others; it’s just a skill. It’s just like Yak is a great speaker and some of us aren’t, right? It’s a skill. Anyway, it’s much less invasive.

By the same token, if you don’t have access to a vet, that cow is not going to make it, right? And even if you do preventive—and all farmers now do, regardless of what type of livestock you have. I’m pretty sure all farmers do regular herd health.

The ARIO Act had committee hearings. Yak, you were there.

But Mark Reusser was there from the OFA, and he mentioned something about vets. He’s a turkey farmer, and each time he gets a new flock, he also gets the vet to make sure that the birds are healthy. It’s kind of the same principle.

So it’s really important that everyone has access, that all livestock farmers—and all companion-animal people too, but for livestock farmers, it’s not only their business, but also, livestock is much harder to move. If you take my example of the cow with the turned stomach, if the nearest vet is 400 miles away—in my case, Cochrane is in the north of my riding; it’s about a three-hour drive for me to go from where I live to the north tip, and that’s the closest vet. So it’s a long trip for a sick cow and the chances of survival are less. Also, you’re trucking that cow back while it’s still in a frail state.

They are looking at ways to be able to do this because it’s a fact of life: We don’t have enough vets. We talk about this on all sides of the House: Animal agriculture is expanding in northern Ontario, but the vets haven’t. Because we’ve got a shortage of vets, it’s harder to get them. I give credit where credit is due: The government has created a program—I believe vets get $50,000 over five years. I think that makes sense.

Another thing that’s just happened is—I talked about this in my first session on this bill but we’ll talk about it a little bit again—again, similar to human health care, it’s harder to get doctors in remote areas, so it’s harder to get vets in remote areas. Where I live, close to New Liskeard, Temiskaming Shores, I don’t consider it remote, but other people maybe would. For years, we’ve had the Northern Ontario School of Medicine so that we get people who grew up in rural Ontario, grew up in northern Ontario, go to medical school, know how great a place it is to live, and it’s easier to not only attract them but to retain them, because they’re used to that, the lifestyle that we love so much.

With vets, it’s the same thing. A program has been created that you can do your first couple of years of veterinary school at Lakehead in Thunder Bay and then go to the University of Guelph, which is the veterinary school of Ontario where all of our vets are trained. But having a campus in Thunder Bay will attract people, hopefully, as the Northern Ontario School of Medicine does, from northern Ontario or from rural Ontario. And hopefully they will be more attracted to large animal agriculture than people who, if you’ve never been exposed to large animal agriculture—you love animals and you get trained to be a vet—it’s a bigger transition. If you’re used to small animals, great, but if the only exposure you’ve had to large animals is through the veterinary course, there’s less of a chance of you becoming a large animal vet.

I mentioned this this morning, too, and I think it’s worthy of mentioning again: To become a vet, to get into vet school, it’s really tough. Now, I was a farmer my whole life, but you know what? I never would have had the grades or the smarts to be a vet—ever. I love animals, but it’s really, really, really tough. I said this morning I don’t think the bar needs to be lowered, but it needs to be shifted. I don’t know exactly how to say this—and I’ve talked to lots of people about this in the farm world—we have to somehow also take the lived experience into account.

So an example—I always use personal experiences, but I hope that I can relate to people by using personal experiences: My kids didn’t want to be vets, and I’m not sure—some of my kids might have had the grades to make it; they didn’t get it from me, but they got some brains—but my kids did see all these things happening. My kids helped with cows with twisted stomachs. My kids helped cows calve. They did all these things. So they have a lived experience that some others might not have. And by the same token, I’m sure there are people who have lived experience with small animals that my kids didn’t have. But if we’re looking for large animal vets, we have to, over the long term, take that lived experience into account. It’s a bit like this place, right? Lived experience should count, and I think it does.

I’m really going on a tangent now, but one of the great things about this place that I didn’t realize—when I got elected here, I assumed that everyone else was going to be a lawyer or a poli sci grad. I’ve got nothing against lawyers and poli sci grads. I’ve got a daughter who’s a lawyer.

Interjection.

Could you demonstrate?

And our two different styles reflect that. You’re very researched; you know what you’re talking about—and me, maybe not so much.

What I have learned about this place is, all our past experiences add to this place—the lived experience, right? The member from Peterborough is nodding. There are things that we’ve all done in our past—that we know something that you didn’t learn in school. That’s important. And in veterinary medicine, we need to look at that, too.

I’d like to switch, because I think I’ve covered the vet part—I might go back to it, but I’ve got a few more cow stories if I run out of time.

Another important part of this bill is the vet tech part. Vet techs are going to be a regulated profession. As veterinary medicine gets much more advanced, much more technical, and as we continue with a shortage of vets, there are many things that a vet tech can do very well; in some cases, maybe not as well as the vet, but maybe better than—and I’m going to again use myself as an example—the livestock owner. But we have to be sure that they’re actually capable, trained to do that, and having them as a registered profession, I think, is a step forward.

I’ll go back to my cow analogy. As I just said, I could never—and I tried it; I am no good at intravenous. I just can’t do intravenous on a cow; I just can’t find the vein, but a vet tech could. So if we can’t get the vet, if the vet is doing something that only the vet can do—a very difficult calving or something—or if there’s a disease outbreak and we need the vet’s not only institutional knowledge but practical knowledge to deal with that, then maybe the vet tech can handle my cow with milk fever. That’s really important.

I don’t want to cause a feud between vets and vet techs, because they work together. They’re also—we hear this a lot from both sides: an interdisciplinary team. Well, that’s vets and vet techs, too. It’s really important.

Actually, one of my staff is a trained vet tech. It’s very interesting, talking to her, because of her lived experience. Cathy Pfeifer is her name. I hope I don’t get in big trouble for saying this, but one of the reasons that makes her great at being a constituency assistant—one of the things that I didn’t realize was so hard about being a vet tech is the personal part. I focused on large animal vets, but if you think about small animals, companion animals, they’re part of your family. If grave decisions have to be made, or if very grave things are going to happen regardless of what you do, it’s the same as losing any other family member.

Vets deal with that too, but vet techs deal with that a lot. If you think about that, that is really, really tough, the social part of that. They deal with people whose—if your companion animal, your dog, your cat has a disease or is hit by something or attacked by a coyote, it’s all-consuming. That falls on the vet tech.

If you think about that—I never really fully until I talked to Cathy. She’s really good at talking to people, and it comes really naturally to her. I didn’t really clue in to why until she started talking about being a vet tech and that actually, in some ways, a constituency assistant was almost easier than a vet tech. And that’s saying something, because we all have people in our offices who do intake, who do—I can’t speak for other offices; I’ll speak for mine. My staff does the majority of the casework. They know more about most things than I do, and they take the toughest stuff. They get it first.

How I learned that—I’m going to go off on another tangent since nobody has done a section 23 on me yet. When I—

Interjection.

And still married. That’s great.

Birth certificates, no?

Tell another cow story.

What if someone’s a bad vet?

Be careful. Be careful.

I have some cow stories, but not all of them—

That’s why the veterinary techs are now part of a regulated profession under this bill. That’s also very important, so that you know when someone has a designation they’ve had the training to actually be worthy of that designation. That’s really important. I said this at the start: This is a regulatory bill about regulating vets and regulating vet techs. That’s what this whole bill is about.

The minister talked about the importance of agriculture in Ontario. Those of us who are actually in the industry know the importance that veterinary medicine plays. Something I just noticed, at a glance, but something else veterinary medicine plays a very important role in is disease outbreaks. There are things like avian influenza, swine fever, BSE—mad cow disease, but it’s bovine—I’ll stick with mad cow disease. You need veterinary expertise to be able to understand and control—“control” is probably the wrong word, but—

Interjection.

I’m going to go back to something I’m the best at, and that’s talking about my own farm. I remember when I started farming and I took over my dad’s farm. Younger, more aggressive, I wanted to up the production in the cows, but I didn’t fully understand feed formulations as much as I should have and I had—we’ll go back to twisted stomachs—eight cows in a row. When I started milking, we milked 30, and when you have eight out of 30—I just about lost the farm, and it was my own management, right? Because I didn’t understand and, at that point, I didn’t have a good enough relationship either with my feed—

I’ll give you one last example, Speaker: Avian influenza is very—that’s not a cow disease; “avian,” that’s a bird disease. But we have wild birds flying around that also carry it, so that’s one of the reasons why many people are worried about backyard flocks of chickens, because they could be vectors for avian influenza. You don’t think about that, but they could be.

Anyway, I’ve only got a few seconds left, so I’d like to thank you very much for allowing me to speak for this long.

I covered it a bit in my speech, but when we’re short of vets, or even if we’re not, the veterinary technician can perform tasks that could, in emergency situations—or even in consultative situations, but certainly in emergency situations—save an animal’s life. And that is a big step forward. It makes a big difference in rural Ontario if we can call and—I always go back to: It’s similar to a doctor and nurse practitioner. It’s very similar; very similar.

It is now time for questions and answers.

I have to compliment the member from Timiskaming–Cochrane because, in reality, it’s a lot easier to speak for an hour on a bill that you oppose than it is to speak on one that you actually support, because there’s a whole lot more on a bill that you are opposing. And we are grateful that you are supporting this bill because we know it’s a good piece of legislation. No piece of legislation is necessarily perfect, but this one does hit a lot of the right marks.

You talked a little about—well, no, you talked a lot about it; I’m only going to talk about it for a few seconds—the extension and the expansion of the powers and the authority of a veterinary technician. You’re a rural member and you talked about the vastness of rural and northern Ontario. That change, what kind of real, positive impacts is that going to have for people who are in the practice of agriculture in your neck of the woods, in their ability to get veterinary help when it’s needed?

I want to compliment my colleague for his remarks. I think we have all in this chamber learned much more about dairy farming than we ever thought we would when we arrived in this place—

But the member knows that Ontarians everywhere are facing significant affordability challenges. The cost of veterinary care is a big barrier for low-income people in their ability to own pets. I want to give a shout-out to veterinarian Dr. Martha Harding, who has clinics in London, Kitchener and now Hamilton to serve low-income pet owners and those on social assistance.

So my question is, is there anything in this bill that will help facilitate the creation of more of these non-profit veterinary clinics that can help low-income people afford the cost of owning a pet?

Further questions?

To the member for Timiskaming–Cochrane: I love your stories. Even more importantly, I love that you were a Masterfeeds customer for so many years; thank you for that.

I’ll cut to the chase. The member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke said it best: I think a lot of this legislation has to do with expanding the scope for veterinary technicians, which I’ll talk about in a few minutes. The vet act hasn’t been changed for 35 years, so my question is, what do you see in the future that will need to take place as animal agriculture consolidates? We’re going to need different types of vets. What do you see in the future, looking at dairy herds down the road? What are the needs going to be for veterinarians down the road, and/or veterinary technicians?

Speaker, as we’ve heard this morning and this afternoon, now is the time for the modernization, advancement and improvement to the vet act, and I’ve appreciated hearing and listening to the many comments that have been made, all supporting this particular piece of legislation. As we all have heard, the Veterinarians Act has not been substantively updated since 1989, and I want to take a moment to thank the Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs for her foresight—again, emphasizing foresight—in bringing Bill 171 forward. It was long overdue, so kudos to her and her team.

If passed, the Enhancing Professional Care for Animals Act would provide a much-needed update to the legislation that governs veterinarians throughout Ontario. As the former parliamentary assistant, I heard from key stakeholders that I’ll talk about in a few minutes, representing organizations such as the College of Veterinarians of Ontario, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture the Ontario Association of Veterinary Technicians, amongst many, many other key stakeholders, about the need for change with this particular legislation. Their feedback was clear, and again, the vet act absolutely needs to be modernized.

I’d also like to acknowledge my colleague the member for Chatham-Kent–Leamington, who is also the deputy House leader, for his role and work as parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. He’s doing a great job and, I know, advocating well for veterinarians and animal health right across this province. I know he has worked hard and supported the minister in helping craft and develop this legislation.

I’d also like to give—and I believe they’re close to you, Speaker—a big shout-out to the entire team at OMAFRA, from the deputy minister and his team, who did a great job, and the chief of staff and her team in the minister’s office. Thank you.

In particular, I’d like to thank Ryan Puviraj—I’m going to call him my wingman—who travelled with me throughout the province, keeping me on the straight and narrow. He certainly was a great support. We had a lot of fun listening and learning to the people advocating on behalf of the changes that were needed to our particular vet act in Ontario.

Let me go back in a little bit of time. I’m not going to tell all kinds of cow stories—but maybe a few, like my friend from Timiskaming–Cochrane. They were great stories. The only thing I would say about—how he did the twisted stomach was a little bit archaic, but there are different ways.

We talked at one time in this Legislature about all kinds of animals—avian, livestock, pork. We even talked about poultry husbandry at one point. I think we even talked about turkey breeding back in the spring of this year or fall of last year.

Agriculture and food is near and dear to my heart, having spent my life around it. My grandfather was a farmer in the Ottawa Valley—not too far from the member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke. I grew up around animals, and I love them. To this day, I have beef cows. I have a farm in that riding—I have had for years—and I have purebred Polled Herefords, so I can tell a lot of vet stories throughout my life.

My first story of remembering what a vet didn’t do: I was probably under five, and I was at the farm at Highway 17 and White Water Road. It’s a blueberry farm now, but that was my grandfather’s farm. I remember that Aunt Lizzie—his aunt, actually; great-whatever she would be—had a dog with porcupine quills in its snout. I remember she was saying, “Call the vet. Call the vet.” My grandfather, coming from the Depression era, said, “It’s going to cost money. We can do this.” So at the age of four or five, I can remember bending down, scared to death, holding on to the muzzle of this collie mix mutt or whatever it was, and my grandfather holding it and pulling those darn quills out with tweezers—and it was kind of gross, but he didn’t want to spend the money. So the need for vets has been around for decades. The dog lived; I’ll tell you that.

I, too, thought about being a vet at one point in my career. But as my teacher said in one of my report cards, “Robbie, school”—

Interjection.

I also sat enthralled for the last 52 minutes listening to the member tell us about the times before this Legislature. It’s always interesting how we can connect our past lives with the work that we do in here, and important to draw from that experience, as he had talked about.

What we are hearing from our various communities is that there is a real lack of access to vets. We had heard about the cost, but also even vets being able to practise. And so some of what I imagine the government heard during consultation was ways to—I’ll say “fast-track,” but I don’t mean “skip steps”—for folks who are internationally trained or are coming and wanting to practise here. Is there anything in this bill that is going to help to speed up the process of getting more vets into the system who are wanting to practise here in the province?

Or wanted to.

But there’s nothing in this bill—it’s a regulatory bill. It’s not going to directly impact them. But it is a big concern.

I don’t want to get all the veterinarians in the world mad at me, but now that we can do pregnancy checks with ultrasound, I think a vet tech could do that, someone trained—because we have AI technicians who breed cows, right? But a vet tech, someone with expertise, should be able to do pregnancy diagnosis very easily. I think that opens up more expertise for vets to look at disease reduction, increasing production. Animal health is going to be more and more important, and I think that will give more breadth to that.

Dr. Connie Dancho and Dr. Lance Males were my later vets at the Temiskaming veterinary clinic. Again, they taught me the value of doing regular herd health, the long-term value.

I don’t know if they’re famous, but they’ve certainly made a huge difference to the farmers in Timiskaming.