I think it’s great we’re debating this bill and talking mostly about our puppies and our dogs and a bit more about the bill. It’s a good way to end the week, and I love everybody’s story about their dogs and their pets and how much affection they have for them.

I have to give a shout-out to Kealey, my black Lab who’s watching at home I’m sure right now. Somehow she has this uncanny knowledge of when I’m going to be home about five minutes before I get home. Whatever day, whatever time, she’s at the front window before the car is visible—well before. I don’t know how that works.

A shout-out to Jackie who was our other black Lab who remained a puppy well into her teens. She lived to 15; we lost her a few years ago. That’s why we got Kealey. Kealey was a bit of a surprise. I’m going to talk about my first dog in a second, but I want to talk about the bill.

There are good things in this bill with regard to puppy mills and with regard to the fines here. I think animal health is very important. We all agree on this. We all have affection for the animals whom we’ve domesticated. I want to juxtaposition that later in the debate to some things that we have to turn our minds to.

I will be supporting this bill, so let me just put that on the record right now. There are very good things in this bill. It could be a bit stronger. A lot of what will make this bill work is what happens outside of here with regard to enforcement.

Here’s the story about my first dog. I’ve got to do this quick. I don’t have too much time—I could go on all afternoon. I was working in the grocery store, managing a grocery store in Kanata. This beagle wandered into what was called the “car pickup” and didn’t want to leave. I guess it sensed food, and it wanted to hang around. So I called the SPCA. Well, it was in the evening and they weren’t open; they weren’t available. No one was there to pick up the dog—and I didn’t have the money. So I take the dog home. I took the dog home for four days and became attached to the dog I think, because when I eventually found the owner, which is another story altogether, and the dog went home, apparently I fell into a slump and my family was all worried about me.

About two months later, my dad says, “I’ve got something I want to show you.” I said, “Sure. Great.” He says, “We’ll go out next week, midweek, and I’ll show you.” One week passed and we missed it, another week passed—three or four weeks, and he finally says, “We’re going to do it this morning.” So I get in the car with him. We’re driving south of the city in Ottawa and he stops at the bank machine. “What the heck is he doing?” I’m thinking.

We’re driving to this place called Patterson’s Berry Farm. They have pumpkins and berries, and this is around Halloween time, and the only thing I can think of is, there’s a picture on my parents’ fridge of my dad with a pot-bellied pig at Patterson’s Berry Farm, and I think, “Oh, my God, he’s bought a pot-bellied pig.” That’s all I could think. I got out to the farm, and it’s pumpkin time. All the moms and dads are out there with their kids, and my dad’s with his kid. The kids were like five and six with the pumpkins. I’m a 37-year-old. I’m there with my dad—I feel a little awkward because I’m older that most of the kids, but I feel like one of the kids. My dad says, “Come with me.” So he takes me around to this barn and we go in the door. He pulls out a little collar and says, “I never bought you a dog”—when I was a kid, and so I had to go into the pen and the dog came to me. She got the little collar so I could pick her up a couple of weeks later because it wasn’t time for her to leave.

Anyway, her name was Marty. So Marty and I were very close. We shared many baguettes, bags of Cheezies and other foodstuff that you’re not supposed to feed dogs. We had a relationship that was really built a lot on food and a common affection, lots of naps together. She was quite an amazing dog. We used to joke—the last dog, Jackie, thought she was a puppy. Jackie thought everybody else was a puppy, but Marty thought she was a person, because she would be looking at whoever was talking in a group.

Anyhow, she was about 10 years old, and she kept getting sick. Eventually, I went to the vet and the vet said, “We can’t do much for her. Bring her back on Monday.” She hadn’t been eating and she was sick, so I got her into the car. I went, “We’re going to the cottage,” because she loved the water. So we’re driving to the cottage. She’s lying in the back. She hasn’t eaten anything for days and days. We stop at Dairy Queen. We get ice cream cones. The dog pops up in the back seat, ends up having an ice cream cone.

We got her to the cottage. I picked her up out of the car and I carried her down to the beach. She went for a little swim. She got pretty tired, so I brought her up, put her on the front porch. She stayed there for the weekend and was visited by all the family—dozens of people. And then we brought her to be put to sleep. She was very close to my mother-in-law—we spent a lot of time at her home when our kids were young—so my mother-in-law, my dad, who had bought the dog, and I were there when she was put to sleep. So it was very crowded in that little veterinary office.

And that’s how much—I’m not telling you a story that’s uncommon or unusual. We have this affection, because we get so much affection from them and there’s so much love. You can pet them; they’re ours, and in a sense, they’re free—they’re free to roam in the domain of our homes, our backyards, the fields where we can take them to do that.

So, in some ways, it’s easy to do this. It’s easy to do this bill because of the affection that we have for animals, and the cruelty that we see is something that hurts us, and sometimes more than when we see the same kind of thing happening to people. I can’t explain the phenomenon.

I can remember when—look it up; I’m not going to go through the story because we’ll be here until midnight: Bam-Bam the deer. It was a deer a family had taken in, and the ministry had to come in and take it away because they had it in a cage, and you can’t cage wild animals, right? Go and check it out. It’s an interesting story. Or if you want, one day, I’ll buy you a beer and tell you the story—or a glass of wine.

Here’s the thing, and the member from Toronto Centre brought this up: animals in pens. I’ll start with penned dog hunting. Why did we open that up again? Two decades ago, we closed it down. The animals that are affected, that it’s cruel to, well, they’re not our domesticated pets, but they’re still animals. It’s not a right practice. I don’t think we should be doing it. I don’t think the government’s ready to revisit it. It’s not the right thing to do. And I’m not saying this to criticize the bill or—it’s just, I really don’t think it’s the right thing to do. I think most reasonable people would think the same way, especially if we thought of them the same way—coyotes and other animals—if we thought of them as our pets. They’re still animals.

The second thing is—I want to bring this up—another penned animal. Marineland: I think it’s important that we bring that up. There have been 17 whale deaths in Marineland—I think I’ve got the number right—and there have been more undersea mammals that have died. As a matter of fact, there have been more mammals that were transferred out of Marineland, more whales that were being transferred out of Marineland that died. And at the same time they were being transferred out, the ministry said—the ministry has been investigating since 2020, four years. The ministry said that, essentially, the sea mammals, the marine mammals, were not doing well because of poor water quality—poor water quality.

Again, penned animals: You can’t pet a whale—well, at least maybe not safely, a killer whale.

Why is that? It’s not right. And the ministry won’t disclose—it doesn’t appear as though we’re enforcing, and then it comes back to this enforcement in this bill. I don’t want to—we raised the fines in long-term care a couple of times, our government, your government. “We’re going to be harder. We’re going to fine people when things go wrong.” Things go wrong; nobody gets fined. That’s the thing about this bill: If it’s going to work, you’ve got to put money into it. You’ve got to have enforcement.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say out of the bill is, we all love our pets. And we should. And we’re really lucky to have them and they mean really important things in our lives. They’re part of our family. But there are other animals that are equally worthy of our consideration, who we don’t have a relationship with, but they are beings. They exist. And penned dog hunting—just not right. I mean, if you put this bill up and you had a picture of penned dog hunting, you’d go, “What? This doesn’t make sense. You’re doing this and you’re doing this?” It’s not right.

Marineland: I know why we’re having a problem with Marineland. It’s because it means jobs. And that’s important. I think it’s important. But it’s time for us to say, “Well, we’re going to be good and right and stop this practice, and we’re going to make sure people have jobs.” Yes, it’s a problem. It’s not unsolvable. It takes two groups of people to get together to do that. I think it’s the right thing to do. I think it’s reasonable.

What’s happening at Marineland is cruel. It’s not just the fact that whales or other sea mammals, marine mammals have died; it’s the fact that they’re penned in, just like Bam-Bam the deer couldn’t be penned in and the ministry rushed in—I won’t go into the story right now. It’s the law. It’s a rule, right? How come you can’t keep a deer in captivity, but you can pen in a coyote or a whale for show, make them do tricks? I mean, it’s 2024.

Anyway, to the minister: I’ll support the bill. I congratulate him for bringing it forward. But let’s think about these other things, because they’re not right. We shouldn’t be doing them, and we should revisit whatever decisions that we’ve made on that.

I thank you for your time. I know it’s late in the afternoon, but I thought that needed to be said.