I had to quit when I lost my thumb.

Interjections.

Anyway, but it’s good that they’re exempted. It’s also good that the government recognizes that farmers, their families, their employees also need to have the ability to administer treatment, right? Because you need to work with your veterinary professionals, you need to work with veterinary technicians, but, with advice from the veterinarian and from the technicians, you also need to be able to treat your own animals. Because if you can’t, if they had disallowed that, there would be times when you either would break that regulation or the animal would die, because some treatments need to be done immediately. One is bloat. I can’t explain bloat completely and how it works internally, but I can explain it from the outside. The cow will fill up with gas and basically their organs will be crushed if you don’t do something to relieve that gas. You can put a hose down their throat. If that doesn’t work, there is a special—I don’t know what you call it; it looks like a screw with a hole in it. You can use that and—we don’t always walk around with those in pockets—if you have to, a pocketknife. I never thought I would say this in the Legislature. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens. It used to happen a lot more when we put cattle on pasture, because fresh alfalfa makes cattle bloat. It’s a beautiful feed if it’s made into haylage or if it’s made into hay, but if it’s fresh and you let the cows out in pasture, then you’re going to need the help of a vet pretty quick.

That’s one example, but there are other examples that you need—and for day-to-day, to administer vaccines. All of these things, you can get the vet or the vet technician to do that. And there are certain things that some farmers do, other farmers don’t do. When I had to give intravenous for a condition called milk fever, I had a hard time finding the vein. I did it a couple of times under the skin. So a cow gets milk—I’m finally finding something I can talk about that I know something about. When a cow gets milk fever—so a cow has a calf. There’s a huge demand for calcium, because milk has a large amount of calcium. If the feed was imbalanced before the cow had the calf, that calcium will be drawn from its body and it won’t be able to stand, so you will need to get calcium into its blood as quickly as possible. The best way to do it is to find a blood vessel in the cow’s neck and give two bottles of intravenous calcium. I was not very good at finding the vein so I just put the calcium under the skin and then called the vet. With this, a vet technician could do that as well, but a lot of farmers treated cows themselves for milk fever; I did it under the skin because some things I just wasn’t good at. A lot of things I wasn’t good at, but that’s another whole story.

But that’s really important that there are exemptions and farmers were happy with that as well, because at the committee—Ontario Federation of Agriculture came, Beef Farmers of Ontario came, Ontario Pork came. I missed somebody; I’m just going on my memory here. And they were also largely—not largely, completely supportive.

The one issue—and I think maybe we can deal with this in the regulations. A veterinary technician needs to work under a vet. And that’s right; we get that. But getting back to northern Ontario, we need to see how big we can make that, so, how close, because even now, the vet could be three hours away. So perhaps if the veterinary technician could be closer and somehow work—and I see I’m getting a thumbs-up from the minister.

But those are the things that we need to work out, the realities of how life actually is. We need to work that out, and I think we can. I think this bill is a step forward because you’re recognizing what veterinary technicians are capable of and what their relationship is with the vet.

Now, I’m focusing on domestic farm animals, because I have more experience with domestic farm animals and the vet than I do with pets.

I have a great story about a baboon, but I can’t tell it—

Interjections.

Just going by talking to my staff member, a former vet tech, I think the small-animal part is, on the personal level, perhaps more difficult than the farm animals, because, although famers—you need to love animals to be successful at farming, but it is our income, our job, where a pet is truly a member of the family.

And it’s funny—I don’t think I’ve told this story to very many, and I’m going to try here. I might get in big trouble for this one. I might get in big trouble.

So, when we sold the dairy farm, we moved. I have a house across from the dairy farm, but I couldn’t watch it, so we bought another house. It was the August long weekend, and I was making a parade float for—I think it was the Elk Lake Civic Holiday parade. We had two miniature poodles, Toffee and Jack, and these things never shut up ever.

Anyway, Jack never liked me much, but Jack always followed me around. So I was building a float, and a two-by-four was up against the float I was building, and the two-by-four fell, and it broke Jack’s leg.

Interjections.

I’m not going to say what would have happened to Jack on the farm, but it did change my perspective for me too. Like, I never—it’s a pet.

One of the issues for vets and vet techs is—and I can see it being incredibly hard—the difference between a commercial animal and a pet. If you think about it, for Jack, Jack lived for another two years. That’s great. And we’re not independently wealthy, but that $5,000, we could afford it. Whether it was a smart investment, I don’t know.