It’s my pleasure to rise in the House today to join the debate on Bill 171 and the importance of enhancing professional care for animals.

Speaker, our government, under the leadership of Premier Ford, is committed towards developing a modern and robust animal welfare ecosystem with laws that keep our animals safe and their owners reassured. The proposed Enhancing Professional Care for Animals Act is part of a series of steps we’ve taken and will continue to take in this direction.

Just last month, I had the pleasure to join the debate on Bill 159, Preventing Unethical Puppy Sales Act, which was brought forward to stop harmful dog-breeding practices and impose stringent penalties on violators. The PUPS Act addressed an important policy issue spotlighted in my very first private member’s bill here in the House, called Protecting Our Pets Act.

And today, this House is taking decisive action towards updating the legislative framework that governs veterinary services in this province. The changes we are debating are much-needed to increase access to veterinary care in Ontario, but most importantly, they answer the requests that veterinary professionals and animal owners have been bringing forward for years. We have arrived here after a long journey involving multiple and meticulous discussions with stakeholders across the province. I’m proud that our government has put our shoulders to the wheel in this process.

Exactly a year ago, in May 2023, I was happy to host a round table with vets in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, with my colleague Rob Flack, who is now the Associate Minister of Housing. Then, he was the parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. He was there to help lead the consultations, along with my colleague from Eglinton–Lawrence. The discussions we held on modernizing the Veterinarians Act have allowed us to stand here with a better understanding of how to strengthen the tools needed by veterinary professionals to do a better job.

Before I move further, I just want to take this opportunity to recognize those stakeholders and partners from my community of Etobicoke–Lakeshore who joined me that day in May 2023. I want to thank them for their work in providing care for our animal companions. I want to acknowledge the tireless animal welfare advocates, such as the Etobicoke Humane Society, Toronto Kitten Rescue, TinyPurring.

And I’ll give a shout-out to Dr. Spence and Dr. Hume from the Islington animal clinic, who see myself and my pets far too often. But that’s the nature of being a pet owner. We are there, and they’re always there to help—just having those conversations with them.

There is always more we can do, and I think this bill is the right step in the right direction.

Speaker, it’s 2024, and we cannot bank on a law first introduced in 1989 to protect the best interests of our pets and pet owners in this province. The Veterinarians Act needed a 2024 reboot. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here. We proposed a law that aims to strengthen governance, transparency and oversight of veterinary care in Ontario.

The Veterinarians Act does not formally recognize the role of veterinary technicians—and a shout-out to all those great vet techs out there. You do an amazing job. You calm the animals down when we bring them in. Sometimes you get to give them a treat. You weigh them. You do a lot of hard work, and I just want to say thank you for all the hard work you do. I know we’re going to give you some more work to do in the future. So congratulations for the work you do right now.

This year, the Toronto Humane Society published a study on accessing veterinary care—it’s over a 13-year period—that speaks out about the relative shortages of vets across Canada. So it’s not just an Ontario problem. Our government is aware of the shortage of vets in parts of the province, particularly in rural Ontario.

Our response, through this bill, is to recognize that vet techs are ready to step up and share the burden. It’s time, as Minister Thompson put it, to switch to a “one team, two professionals” approach to deliver animal care that is relevant to the times that we live in.

Speaker, everyone has heard me mention my two pets at home, Bruce and Edward. I have, as I mentioned, an amazing veterinarian. Actually, I have a team of veterinarians, because Bruce has a ton of problems. Sometimes, it takes a village, I say, to raise these problem animals. He has allergies; he’s allergic to absolutely everything. He was a rescue dog, so we tried to figure out what was wrong with him. Special food, special diet—this works, this doesn’t work. Vet bills go up, vet bills go up, but my goodness, do we love that little boy to death, I’ll tell you.

Though this morning, he bit me because I was trying to cut his hair, and it didn’t quite work. He won that battle this morning. So, I took some gel and I slicked it back, because that was the battle I was going to take on.

It’s an honour to rise today and speak in support of Bill 171, Enhancing Professional Care for Animals Act.

Speaker, it’s an important act to modernize. We know there’s a shortage of veterinary services in the province of Ontario, and this act takes an important step of addressing that shortage, partly by modernizing the regulatory framework for veterinarians, but most importantly, modernizing the regulatory framework for registered veterinary technicians. I think it’s important to expand the scope of practice for vet technicians to better enable them to relieve the burden on veterinarians and to offer more team-based veterinary care in the province of Ontario. I’ve been a big advocate for team-based care for people, and we certainly need team-based care for animals as well, and this act takes an important step to helping us achieve that.

I want to take a few moments to talk about some ways that I believe we need to address the shortage of veterinarians in the province of Ontario. Right now, we’re not even graduating enough veterinarians to cover the number of veterinarians that are retiring. And the government made some important steps to address this problem by expanding the number of veterinary placements through a partnership between the University of Guelph and Lakehead University, increasing the number of vets by 20 each and every year over the next number of years. This is an important step in the right direction, especially when we live in a world where it’s harder to get into vet school than it is to get into med school—

But we are lucky in the province of Ontario that, at the University of Guelph, we have the number one ranked veterinary school in Canada, the number three ranked veterinary school in all of North America and one of the top 10 veterinary schools in the entire world. We have the capacity in this province to address the shortage of veterinarians in Ontario with a high-class university like the University of Guelph.

And so, I’m going to make a quick comment to my friends on the other side of the aisle. We’ve made important steps in helping the University of Guelph expand veterinary services. I’m going to ask you to even do more. Let’s provide even more funding to the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph so we can expand the number of veterinary placements there so we can continue to graduate veterinarians to serve the people of this province and ensure that our animals are well cared for. I’m happy to work across all party lines to help make that happen, Speaker.

We know there’s a shortage of veterinarians in Ontario, and this is an important step in addressing it, like I’ve said. We can go even further by supporting the University of Guelph and expanding the number of places at the OVC.

So I’m always happy to read petitions supporting especially the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph and will continue to say to members of all political stripes in this Legislature that I am ready, willing and able to work with you to expand the number of veterinarian placements at the OVC, because we have a shortage of veterinarians in the province of Ontario and we have the top-ranked university in the province willing to fill that shortage.