SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
March 21, 2024 09:00AM

I would thank the member from Guelph, particularly for bringing up the importance of the work that’s done at the University of Guelph, not only the veterinarian college, but the Ontario agriculture centre.

As you mentioned, we had the folks here from OCUFA yesterday, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. I was lucky enough to have met with a woman that works at the Ontario Agricultural College who said that Guelph is running a deficit, and it’s having a direct impact on faculty members at our institution. She works in the plant agriculture lab, and they’re losing three plant-breeding faculty, which means that important crops for Ontario agriculture will have no public breeding and research, including corn, which is a predominant row crop grown in Ontario, and the research that they do to identify resistant strains.

So they were here saying that the universities need to be properly funded, that we are losing our edge that we have had in research and training, because our universities are all running a deficit. Can you speak to how this directly speaks to being able to implement and act on the intention of this bill, which is to have enough veterinarians and vet technicians to serve our animal friends?

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