Rotary Club of Guelph Weekly Bulletin

President Paul welcomed members and guests to his 17th Rotary Club meeting as chair of proceedings on the occasion of former Guelph MPP and Minister of Education Liz Sandal’s presentation of a Day in the Life of an MPP

Guests

Chris Hebert – Trevor Lee

Joan Mitges – Don Parr

Ruth Parr – Don Parr

Rotarian For Life Presentation – Don Parr

President Paul was delighted and honoured to be presenting Don Parr (his proposer) with his Rotarian For Life award in return for his long and outstanding service to Rotary and the community. Paul also expressed his personal thanks to Don for being his friend, mentor and his very significant role and involvement in supporting his own personal life journey and related growth and development as an individual and a Rotarian.Don was honoured to receive the designation

Announcements

Sign-Up for Lights-Up.

Barb Holmes encouraged able body members to sign-up for assisting in this year’s development of the Sparkles in the Park Christmas Lights Show. Members will be receiving an email from Terrie Jarvis with an on-line sign up capability. Please sign up for set up duties, donation collections, and take-down activities.

Rotary Local Lager Gift Packs

Helmuth Slisarenko had 32 Rotary Local Lager Gift Packs ready for pick-up at the end of the meeting for members who had previously ordered. Order forms were on the tables for those had not yet ordered their gift packs.

Adopt-a-Family

Diane Dance indicated that the club was participating in the Adopt-a-Family program for Christmas. Diane was hoping that we can surpass the previous years performance of being to provide supporting contributions to 2 families with a total of eight children in 2017

Happy Bucks

Paul Taylor had bucks to thank all Rotarians who had participated in the Testing of the Lights event for Sparkles at Bob Irelands home last week. Apparently, at least 80% of the lights were on.

New Member Induction – Anne McKay

Liz Cooney had the pleasure of introducing Anne McKay to the Club. Annis a former practitioner and retiring consultant and volunteer fundraising specialist with local, regional and national experience with organizations and clients across the country. Anne has served in fundraising leadership roles with the Canadian Cancer Society, the Arthritis Society and for 12 years was the head of development for the United Way of Kitchener, Waterloo & Area, co-facilitating training for the national agency. She is now working with Hospice Wellington assisting in facilitating special gifts and also has volunteer fundraising experience with the Canadian Association of Gift Planners, Conestoga College, the Community Foundation and is a Board member with Guelph Public Library. Ann has built a career on the power of relationships and hopes to continue that development with Rotary.

Program – A Day in The Life of an MPP – Liz Sandals

Marty Fairbairn provided a brief introduction for the Speaker of the Day former Club Member, MPP and Minister of Education Liz Sandals. Marty outlined Liz’s extensive prior activity in the educational administration and policy field as Public School Board Trustee (1988 – 2003), Ontario Public School Board Association Member and President (1998 – 2002) and also her later stint as President of Treasury Board (2016-2018)

Liz Sandals

There is no such thing as a typical day in the life of an MPP according to Liz. Not knowing quite what to expect is one of most interesting features of being an MPP. Nonetheless, Liz provided members with insights into three main components of the daily life and times of an MPP based on her own 4 term experience as Member of Provincial Parliament for Guelph from 2003 to 2018 in her various portfolio’s

MPP - The Job

Job 1 for Liz and all MPP’s is Constituency Work, largely solving individual and community problems with provincial related issues like access health and social service issues and somewhat surprisingly helping individuals get access to their birth certificates for individuals and getting on-site MRI capability at Guelph General and GO Train/High Speed Rail access to Guelph for the community

JOB 2 albeit not Liz’s favourite activity – Legislative Duties. Liz was not a fan or comfortable with the extreme partisanship in this line of work. On the plus side of things occasionally she did have the opportunity to work on, and with, more positive and congenial committee’s and individuals like “Public Accounts” under chairmanship of Norm Sterling and guidance of former Auditor General Jim McCarter on “The Select Committee on Mental Health and Addiction”

JOB 3 – Government Duties – Assisting in formulating and facilitating policy and legislative development and implementation - Perhaps Liz’s favourite activity given her self described “Policy Wonk” characterization in her extensive roles as a parliamentary assistant and cabinet minister in government. The parliamentary assistant roles always involved shepherding the respective ministry’s legislation through legislative committee and debate along with other assigned roles with ministers served. (Kwinter, Phillips, Wynne, Matthews).

Policy Wonk Files

Liz’s files included:

Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services:

Grow Op Remediation Legislation
Police and fire -> municipal and building code

Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care:

Reduce prescribing of opioids
Wealth of govt data vs health record confidentiality

Ministry of Education:

Given Liz’s prior School Board history Dalton McGinty recruited Liz to chair the Safe Schools Action Team (SSAT) which initially focused on

Bullying - which subsequently morphed into Sex Ed - STILL a live file
Discipline

The SSAT released a findings and subsequent legislation and policy guidelines reports on bullying in 2005, (the first official recognition of cyberbullying in Canada following extensive province wide research and consultation activity with victims, parents, educators (admin and teachers, counselors), police, community services (counseling, mental health, sexual assault). The key findings included:

Bullies choose targets based on:
- appearance and intellectual ability
- race, religion, ethnic origin
- homophobia & sexual harassment
Bullying is not just physical - it is also social and emotional
School based bullying is inter-related with cyberbullying
Students have little, if any, knowledge of internet safety
Suicide is 2nd leading cause of death for teenagers
Police reported disproportionate number of teen suicides related to homophobia
Various sources including police expressed concern over impact of media that young people are accessing, in particular, the normalization of sexual assault and violence against women & gang rape
Public Health and counseling services expressed concern over the normalization of oral sex at an early age (e.g. grade 7/8). You can’t get pregnant! – “Nobody told them about STD’s!”

Similar reports and sets of Policy Guidelines were issued in 2006 on

Discipline, and
Culture of Respect / Healthy Relationships

Sex Ed

Research, consultation and legislation development and implementation on the Sex Ed file continued under Dalton’s premiership but increased in prominence under Kathleen Wynne’s premiership and Liz’s tenure as Minister of Education with subsequent controversial implementation of a policy change re Public Health Education re Public School Curriculum in 2015

The Wynne Sex Ed mandate included a request to report on gender-based violence, homophobia, sexual harassment, inappropriate sexual behavior plus various technical issues. Again, some key findings:

Young children who can accurately describe their body parts are more likely to report sexual abuse. You have to teach them they have the right to say NO to people like coaches and uncles and it’s OK to tell.
Sexual orientation was one of top 3 motivations for hate crimes
56.3% of all hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation were violent
Sexual harassment in schools is common. 46% of girls in Grade 9 and 46% of girls in Grade 11 report being targeted by unwanted sexual comments or gestures.
Peel Public Health Survey of 7000 Gr 7-12 students
26% of students had sexual intercourse in the last 12 months
62% of the sexually active students were 15 years of age or younger when they first had sex
A change in student behavior required change in curriculum including addition of a discussion on sexting and explicit definitions of consent.

The Curriculum changes were designed to protect student health and safety and improve student behavior. Implementation of the curriculum policy revisions followed the most exhaustive and extensive research and consultation process ever and included meetings with the leadership of various religious and cultural groups who had expressed concerns along with the presidents of all publicly funded elementary schools in Ontario.

Parting Comments

Not surprisingly, Liz was more than a little frustrated with the recent rollback of this important legislation. On a more positive note Liz said that It had been an honour to serve her constituents in Guelph and the people of Ontario – She misses the people and the policy making but NOT the legislature. Moreover, she is now eternally grateful that she does not have to live through the current vile environment in the house today. She wished the very civil MPP Mike Schreiner and long serving MPP neighbour Speaker Ted Arnott all the very best in fulfilling their new roles.

Bonnie Evans thanked Liz for her presentation and hard work and commitment in 30 years of public service. A sentiment shared by President Paul.

50/50 Draw – Elaine Beatty

Next Week – Bryn Styles – Former RI Director