Thank you to the Associate Minister of Housing for the question.

He said a great comparison with the nurse practitioner program and what we’ve done with that program to improve services in Ontario for all people to get primary care.

Similarly speaking, by regulating and increasing the scope of our vet techs, it will free up time for our veterinarians to increase their capacity to get to our farms and address the more acute illnesses that your livestock may suffer from.

I think the vet techs are very important and the changes in the regulations are very important, so that a vet does not have to be beside that vet tech all the time in order for them to do that work. It will definitely increase the capacity of those veterinarians.

I think the education of our farmers is another aspect of addressing and building the capacity of our veterinarians. But again, like I said in my presentation, we’ve got an untapped resource in the vet techs because some of them have a farming background; they’ve been working alongside veterinarians; they have their professional training, and we haven’t been tapping that resource to its full potential. This bill will make that happen.