It’s a great honour and a pleasure to be able to welcome John Whitehead here from St. Catharines. He is a diabetes advocate from Niagara.

Thank you for all your hard work that you’ve done over the years. Welcome to your House, John.

Very quickly, I would just like to invite everybody to Diabetes Canada. They’re in 230 today and they would like to see as many of you as possible.

As you know, Speaker, people, students, businesses rely on the Internet to go about our day, whether it’s for your business to conduct your business, for students to study, for people to communicate with their community.

Unfortunately, the program that the government has put into place is a program that is 100% privately delivered. The government gives the private sector a lot of money to build infrastructure and run Internet. This does not work in many parts of northern Ontario, where there are no providers who want to set up shop. It doesn’t matter how much money the government wants to give them; they do not want to set up shop in northern Ontario because there is no money to be made. But the people of northern Ontario, we need Internet access, just like everybody else. We want it to be affordable and we want it to be high-speed. We want to be part of the connection that the Internet brings.

So I fully support this petition. I think it’s very much needed, and I will ask my good page Myah to bring it to the Clerk.