My wife is still my wife, so—maybe the best $5,000 I ever spent. But I thought about it after: If Jack had belonged to someone who didn’t have it, that’s an incredibly, incredibly tough decision.

It came up a little bit during the committee—not about Jack, but we put some amendments forward about making it easier for not-for-profit groups to run veterinary clinics. I believe the member from London West will talk about this in much better detail later. But I did think about that, because companion animals are often companions for people who have struggles. People who have struggles often have animals. They wouldn’t be able to deal with Jack, but cases like Jack could still happen to them. That’s a hard one to come to grips with.

Also, to train to be a veterinarian, to train to be a vet tech costs a lot of money, so I don’t begrudge that they need to recoup that money and need to make an income. I don’t begrudge that at all. But somehow, we have to find a way to make that work.

What else have I got in my notes here? I’m going to change since I don’t think anybody is going to stop me now. I’m just going to give a report. I was going to do this at the top, but I haven’t. I’ve spoken a couple of times about a local cheese factory in our riding, Thornloe Cheese. Last October, Gay Lea closed it without any warning. It really made us angry. A committee was formed. We got close to 7,000 names on a petition. They held rallies. We supported. Gay Lea has since come out and said they haven’t announced who, but the negotiations are progressing and they’re hoping to make a good announcement in the near future that Thornloe Cheese may resume operations.

So I don’t want to jinx it by saying it before, but Gay Lea came out and said that. I commend them for listening to the community. The community was disappointed. They recognized that, and they are working towards the rebirth of Thornloe Cheese. What is in the deal is the building, the quota, the recipes, the trademarks. If we can pull this off, this will be the second time. Parmalat, years ago, when I was on the milk committee, announced its closure and we pulled it from the fire, and I’m very hopeful that we are going to pull it from the fire again.

I did an interview with CTV today and they asked why Thornloe struck such a chord with people in our area. The Timiskaming area, for those of you who have never been—and you’re all welcome to come—we talk about agriculture here but agriculture isn’t the first thing you think of when you think of northern Ontario. But when you cross the hill into the valley, into the Little Clay Belt, agriculture is the only thing you see. It’s incredible.

There are many agricultural operations that sell from the farm, but there’s nothing really on the scale of Thornloe Cheese. It’s what we can point to. It was distributed across the country, it makes great products and that’s the only thing that we could really point to that actually comes out of Timiskaming. There’s all kinds of milk and all kinds of grain and all kinds of canola, but Thornloe Cheese—to be able to work to get that back, we are very hopeful. If we can help at all, I’d certainly like to make it public that if and when a new owner for Thornloe Cheese announces, we will do everything in our power to make that operation successful.

I remember when the closure was announced, the Minister of Agriculture approached me and the Minister of Northern Development and Mines approached me, because they all knew the importance of Thornloe. We will all work together to make sure that Thornloe once again not only comes back to life, but is successful and emblematic of our community. That is not 100% good news, yet but it’s going in the right direction.

I’d like to commend the committee. The committee has had some criticism. We came out really strong at the start because we needed to show Gay Lea that we were serious, but they toned it back when Gay Lea was in negotiations, because when you’re having true negotiations, you give people space. We are fully prepared to continue to do that and to commend Gay Lea and the new company, once an announcement is forthcoming.

My last issue I’d like to talk about has something to do with veterinarians, it has something to do with agriculture and it has something to do with—but it’s a bit more of a stretch, so if somebody wants to stop me, you can.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get this issue on the floor again, but I’m going to today. We have had had a case—the minister knows where I’m going, and the former Minister of the Environment probably will know where I’m going in a second—in Timiskaming where the lagoon from a former dairy farm was enlarged, and it is now used to import raw human sewage. Now, that raw human sewage is being spread on the fields, with approval. This is with approval.

This is something we need to look at. When you spread animal manure on farmland you need a nutrient management plan so that you can prove that you’re doing it safely, that you’ve got enough acres, that you’re not polluting the land and that the crops that come from that land are safe. When you use biosolids you need a non-agricultural source material plan to administer those biosolids so you can do the same thing.

But when you use raw human sewage, it’s up to the Minister of the Environment. And I am not criticizing the people who work for the ministry at all, but we are raising the question of whether the ministry has the capability to actually administer that.

When that site was first developed, we brought it to the ministry’s attention that it actually was a former dairy farm, that there was infrastructure under the concrete, and we were told, “No, no, this is a greenfield site”—it wasn’t. When we asked if they checked the well that serviced that dairy farm—“Oh, no, there is no well.” Well, the only people who didn’t know there was a well there were the ministry and—appeared to be—the operator. Everybody else knew there was a well there. And then, they found the well, and it turns out that there was a path from the lagoon to the well under the concrete in the former dairy structure.