It’s my pleasure to welcome to the House Zahid Butt and Shahnaz Tehseen. They are from my riding, and they’re also representatives of the Pakistan Business Association.

Welcome to Queen’s Park.

Thank you for sharing your story about your dog. We all enjoy our pets, and this is an important bill for that reason.

On the weekend, I had the pleasure of joining the Pet Valu-Lions Foundation dog guide walk to raise money for dog guides across Ontario. It was in Dundas. As you would know, these dogs provide—there are vision dogs, there are hearing ear dogs, there are dogs that support families with autism and seizure response. These are families who are very vulnerable, and I did hear that even some of the dogs, if they have certain nutrition requirements, they can’t keep them with the home because the families are vulnerable and they’re struggling with maintaining their income levels.

My question to you is, these dogs will need veterinarian support, and we had a question earlier about one of the problems is that we don’t have enough opportunity for not-for-profit veterinarian options. Can you speak to how we might able do that in the province?

To the member for Guelph, we had a question earlier where we wanted to be assured that the college would enforce issues of animal abuse. My colleague from Niagara Falls talked about a terrible case in St. Catharines. The corollary to this bill is the PAWS Act, if you ask me. I know that I had an instance in my riding—the dog’s name was Merlin, who was abused. It took a very long time for residents to get an answer or to get some action on that.

One of the things that’s really concerning is that the number of charges that have been laid under the PAWS Act has dropped—a shocking drop, a significant drop in the charges. Would you share my concern that we’ve changed the protecting animal welfare system but that we don’t have the resources and the budget in place to make sure that we have enough inspectors and enough investigations happening so we can actually continue to make sure that animals are safe in this province?