Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: On his way to this place, the Ottawa Citizen headline remarked, "Mitchell Wins Carleton with Awesome Ease." That's because in his first election as an MPP, after serving nine years as deputy mayor, deputy reeve and councillor for the city of Nepean, and six of those years at the regional municipality of Ottawa-Carleton, he came to this place in a landslide to serve in Bill Davis's caucus and later Frank Miller's cabinet. Before politics, he served for 10 years in Canada's military and, perhaps most importantly to many of us in Nepean, he was Nepean's Citizen of the Year.

So I consider it a great privilege to rise on behalf of Tim Hudak and the entire Progressive Conservative caucus out of respect for one of our own, our former PC MPP Bob Mitchell. I'll be sharing my time with the member for Carleton-Mississippi Mills, who was able to serve with Bob Mitchell in both Frank Miller's and Bill Davis's administrations. I'd also like to acknowledge my colleague from Wellington-Halton Hills, who became great friends later on in his life with Bob Mitchell and has fond memories of him as well.

I'm pleased that my friends from Nepean-Carleton are able to join us today, and those are Mr. Mitchell's family: Leta Mitchell, Jeff Mitchell, Melanie Reid, Jane Mitchell-Haynes, and Ken Ross, a friend of the family and a friend of mine.

I only ever had one occasion to speak with Bob Mitchell. It was just before his death in 2007. I called him while he was in hospital. Though I never really knew Bob Mitchell-and I certainly have gotten to know Jeff and the rest of the family far better-our lives, I've learned after his death, crossed many times.

I grew up in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. My father had a very good friend named Jim Mitchell. He was and still is a fantastic community man who has given so much to so many different organizations. It was during my dad's own battle with cancer, which was months after Bob passed away, that I would see Jim ever-present at our house, my mother's house or at the hospital. They told me that Bob Mitchell was his brother. I learned that Bob, like Jim, was a community advocate first and foremost. I think that signified his career in all of public service, whether it was as a community association president, a city councillor, an MPP or just a person who wanted to contribute to the good of Nepean-Carleton or the old region of Carleton county.

Bob was instrumental in Canada's Centennial celebration in Nepean. He had a major hand in almost every single one of our cherished institutions. To name a few: Algonquin College, Queensway Carleton Hospital, the Nepean Sportsplex and, of course, the John McCrae Secondary School, which was the first high school in Barrhaven.

Bob was one of a visionary group of Conservative politicians of the day who developed what was then a quiet bedroom community in the old city of Ottawa into what is now a major suburban centre in the province of Ontario, right within our nation's capital.

In the first provincial campaign that he undertook, he talked about the lack of skilled workers in high tech, the need for more long-term-care beds and the importance of infrastructure in what is now the city's southwest end. Today, 30 years later, in this Legislature we are still talking about the issues that Bob Mitchell raised in that first by-election campaign.

His ministerial portfolio focused on science and technology, and his son-in-law John Sparks told the Ottawa Sun after his passing, "It's no coincidence that Nepean became a Canadian high-tech centre."

But for all the big projects and the big ideas that Bob Mitchell had, I think he will be best remembered as a constituency man. In his own words, he told the Ottawa Citizen when he left this place, "I think I'll miss helping people, the day-to-day contact with people off the street. I've never lived on the banquet circuit; I've always preferred constituency work." And so he did, and so he will be remembered.