I would like to say a few words in tribute to Dr. Barry Adams, a pediatrician from Ottawa who was my pediatrician and my children’s pediatrician and, in fact, the pediatrician for thousands and thousands of families over his long career.

Barry was an incredible, gentle, warm, kind person. He was always available. He was a big proponent of our Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. I wanted to spend all this time talking about his accolades, but his accolades are actually the thousands and thousands and thousands of families whose lives he touched and improved by his work.

I was thinking about what Barry would have had to say today, if he were alive, about what’s happening at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and with our children in this province.

Barry could be very kind and very gentle, but he could also be very stern. And what he would be asking us is, “Why is there this indifference to what’s happening to our children? Why are we not masking? Why are we not making sure we’re all vaccinated and our kids are vaccinated?”

You know, Barry was a physician who was old enough to know when measles outbreaks occurred, and he was always astonished at the efficacy of the vaccine, and how it was almost non-existent.

So, Speaker, I think we should learn from Dr. Barry Adams’s example that our children are important and that right now there are some things that we need to do to protect our children. We should be doing them: masking, vaccination, washing our hands and staying home when we’re sick.