It’s a pleasure today to stand and speak about this bill. It has a number of measures to support workers in it, and many of them make sense. Almost all of them make sense.

I’m going to focus my remarks on schedule 6 of this bill, but before I do that, I just want to mention one measure which makes a lot of sense to me, and that is to get rid of family doctor notes and replace them with something else, like an attestation or whatever is decided in the future when it comes to justifying sick day entitlements. That’s going to save valuable time for family doctors, something that we need to create more of to resolve our health care crisis. It goes back to the practice that was in place under the previous Liberal government, and I think it’s a bit of red tape that this government should not have created in the first place.

Let me get to schedule 6, which modifies the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, 1997. It addresses wildland firefighters and fire investigators. This is a very seasonal kind of work. In the middle of the firefighting season, we could have around a thousand people in Ontario working in the ministry on wildland firefighting. It’s good to know that the workplace safety and insurance coverage will be applied to these workers. We’re talking about not only firefighters, but you’ve got helicopter and water bomber pilots and people who work with the radio, warehousing and logistics, as well as firefighting. What this bill covers is, it covers PTSD and it covers skin cancer, and it covers it in a way where there’s a presumption that if you suffer from these things, you don’t have the burden of proof to show that it was caused by your workplace.

We know that a lot of things that burn in fires are carcinogenic, and there’s also an issue with protective equipment which contains these forever chemicals. I’ll get to that a bit later but let me just say that I very much support the idea that Bill 190 would extend this presumptive coverage for post-traumatic stress disorder to wildland firefighters and wildland fire investigators, and as well extend the presumptive coverage for skin cancer.

One thing that I want to mention in addition to smoke and the carcinogenic effects of smoke is the firefighters’ protective clothing. It’s called turnout gear. It’s essential for working in dangerous environments, like where there’s a fire. You’ve got waterproofing, heatproofing, fireproofing and so on. The firefighting community has raised concerns about whether these chemicals—these per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS, otherwise known as “forever chemicals” because they degrade with great difficulty in the environment—can affect the health of firefighters. Some of them have been linked to cancer, and they’re used in the current gear.

Until recently, there has been not that much information regarding the specific types of PFAS chemicals and the quantities and where in the equipment that was located. It was only last year in the United States that the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued a report which studied this really, really carefully, where the PFAS chemicals were in the firefighting gear. So this is a relatively new thing, and because of that, we should be a little bit careful and realize that that could be affecting the health of firefighters.

I want to go on now a little bit past schedule 6, because I think it’s important to cover wildland firefighters for skin cancer and PTSD, but there are a couple of things I think that this bill could have done to help with our ability to maintain a strong workforce to fight wildland fires.

When I went to visit Thunder Bay recently, I found out that in Thunder Bay, the Ministry of Natural Resources has been losing firefighters to the Thunder Bay city fire department because, again, fighting fires is a seasonal job. Because it’s a seasonal job, a lot of the times the workers are finding other things to do in the off-season, or we hire a lot of students who then go to class. But then, if people are thinking about starting a career, they move to something like the city fire department, which was documented in Thunder Bay. That is not a good thing for having a strong, experienced workforce to fight wildland fires.

Something that could be done by our government to improve working conditions and to preserve that institutional wildland firefighting knowledge is to have more crew leaders who are full-time, year-round employees. They may not be fighting fires all year round, but the idea is that we can find other things for them to do in the government. This has been done in the past.

What are crew leaders? These are people who would lead a team of four people; get dropped, say, by helicopter into a fire area; and they’d be carrying equipment as well—maybe, I was told, a long hose, like a 2,400-foot hose and other equipment to fight fire. None of these crew leaders are full-time right now. It would be a good thing to make sure that they’re full-time so they make a career of being a wildland firefighter and preserve that institutional memory, which allows them to fight fires more effectively and more safely for the rest of their crew.

This is not a trivial task. It will require a little bit of extra management effort to make sure that they have other useful things to do during the other parts of the year. But I think it would be something that would be good to do. Otherwise, we’ll get more turnover than is optimal.

The government said recently that they would be creating 100 permanent positions. I think we’re still waiting, if I’m not mistaken, for clarification about what exactly that means. Which jobs will become permanent positions? Does that mean year-round or what?

Another thing that’s missing that I think could help that I discovered when I was speaking to a company in Thunder Bay, and also firefighters, is there’s a shortage of helicopter pilots. There’s a shortage of pilots but especially helicopter pilots.

I went and talked to a friend of mine who commanded a helicopter squadron in the Canadian Forces and was also a dean at a community college, so he knew a lot about training and about what it takes to train highly skilled helicopter pilots. I asked him, “What is the barrier to getting people to go into a career as a helicopter pilot?” He said, “The barrier is it’s very expensive to become a helicopter pilot.”

First of all, you have to get your fixed-wing licence. You have to spend hundreds of hours to get your licence to be a fixed-wing pilot. Each one of these hours, you’re operating a substantial piece of equipment, so that’s a lot of hours of fuel and wear and tear on the equipment to get that experience. Only then can you go and become a helicopter pilot.

And you can’t just become any kind of helicopter pilot who flies from one airport to another airport; you have to have special skills. So, for example, you might have to hover over rough ground while discharging firefighters and their equipment, and that’s not something that you would do if you’re only trained to fly from airport to airport.

So one of the things that we need to do to relieve this helicopter pilot shortage—and I know that this government has looked into ways to get more skilled labour to help our economy, but when it comes to helicopter pilots, who are in short supply, are important for our mining industry and also natural resources, fighting wildland fires, we have to think carefully about whether we should be helping with the cost of training to become a helicopter pilot for these purposes.

I believe that this bill has a number of good measures. But, generally speaking, I think there are many other things that could be done, and I’ve tried to address a couple of them in my speech today. I look forward to answering any questions.