One of the things I get to really enjoy—I think we all should hopefully take the time to enjoy, and I trust we all do. This time of year, we, as elected officials, get to participate in our Santa Claus parades in a lot of our communities across the province.

In Sault Ste. Marie, we had our annual Santa Claus Parade that is hosted by our Rotary Club of Sault Ste. Marie this past Saturday. I had a great time participating in that. We put a float together. I want to thank my staff, Kathy, Jen and Edie, for working so hard to put it together. I want to thank my mom, Lina, and my kids, Jayden, Jackson, and Jarrett, who participated with me in walking down Queen Street in Sault Ste. Marie and handing out candy canes to thousands. I think we distributed just shy of 3,500 candy canes on Saturday.

One of the fun moments is being able to participate with your family, I find, in these parades, getting to walk up and down the streets and shake hands with the members of your community. It is a fun moment that I think we all have as elected officials. I trust so many of you enjoy that as well.

Of course, the one drawback, Mr. Speaker, as I’m sure you’ve seen your fair share of parades as well, is you never—and my kids point this out as we’re always leaving the parade route. That’s when you actually see the floats, as everybody is dismantling them along the parade route. You don’t get to see them, Mr. Speaker, but it’s fun to participate and welcome Santa Claus to town.

It’s exciting for me to be able to rise and speak about something that was quite a lot of fun. Last Saturday I had the privilege and the pleasure of participating, as we always do as elected officials, in our annual Santa Claus parade. The Rotary Club in Sault Ste. Marie hosts the Santa Claus parade; it’s a yearly tradition in our community. Unfortunately, for a couple of years, we weren’t able to participate in our parade as usual.

But I was very, very proud that, during the period of the last couple of years, I’ve been stockpiling these little mini sticks and pucks that we had my office staff put together. I really want to thank my staff in the office—Kathy Beattie, Jen Bellerose and Edie Suriano—who worked tirelessly, putting together all these pucks and sticks. We had 5,000 of them on a trailer and went down Queen Street in Sault Ste. Marie. The look on the kids’ faces was absolutely out of this world. They were so excited.

I really want to thank my wife, Heather; my mom, Lina Romano; and my three boys, Jayden, Jackson and Jarrett, who helped in distributing the sticks; and, of course, all of my staff, again, Edie, Jen and Kathy, as well as Carrie Suriano and Steve Shaw, Jaelyn and Paige, and also Mike—special thank you to you all for helping me out.

It was a huge success, although I had to run up and down the street quite a bit. We had a blast. The kids had a blast. It was absolutely outstanding, and so good to have them all back out again.