June 27, 2007 Address to West Credit Secondary Graduation
Each of us needs to be at our best

At the 2007 graduation ceremony at West Credit Secondary School in Meadowvale on June 27, 2007, I spoke with the graduates and their families and teachers on behalf of the Province of Ontario. A few parents asked if I had prepared my remarks, and in this case, I had. Here they are.

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, parents, friends and graduates…

Today is the day, and this is the hour in which you graduate. To the delight of everyone who loved you and believed in you, you have become secondary school graduates. Despite anyone who was skeptical about you, or who may have said you couldn’t achieve this goal, you succeeded anyway.

This is a day and an hour that will be like your wedding day, the birth of a child of yours, or winning a sports championship. This is a time to live in the moment. Yesterday is gone forever, and tomorrow won’t matter until you leave here. This is a time to celebrate your achievement in the here and now, to live in the moment.

Just before the 2003 election, an old friend who had served in the Ontario Legislature before me told me one night that I should remember to enjoy election night, because, in his words, “You only win your first election once.”

You’ll each only graduate from secondary school once, so celebrate when the moment comes, and don’t be shy about it. And this is that moment.

You, and your folks, and your friends get to see what difference your graduation can make in one life – yours. I get to see what a difference that hundreds of thousands of graduates can make in the life of one province – ours.

Think about it. We are only 13 million people here in Ontario. We are about the same size and same population as the country of Sweden. And we, as Ontarians, are not competing against the people next door, or the company across town, or the province to the east or west of us, or with the states adjacent to us. Ontario is competing with places like China and India, each with more than a billion people. Ontario is going head-to-head with the entire European Union, which has more people than the United States.

And with only 13 million of us, Ontario needs each of us to be at our best if we want to continue to be the envy of the world, and be the place where everyone wants to come and every company wants to be. Make no mistake, we are that kind of place in Ontario. Let me provide just one example. Some of you, I am sure, like to tinker around with cars. The people at Toyota, in Japan, think they make pretty good cars. The rest of the world agrees, and buys them up as fast as Toyota makes them.

Toyota wanted to set up a plant that would be the first in the world to manufacture its Lexus cars and their parts outside Japan. Everybody wanted that plant. States and countries alike went to Japan to pitch their case to Toyota to locate in the U.S, or in Europe, or in South America.

But what did Toyota want? Toyota wanted to be near the U.S. market, to have access to a good transportation network, to know that their electricity would be affordable and secure, and most of all, to be able to recruit a work force as good as what they had in Japan.

For Toyota, it was an easy call. Toyota wanted Ontario. Toyota wanted people just like you. And they are now setting up that state-of-the-art auto plant near Woodstock, an hour southwest of here on Highway 401.

Good people and being able to hire and train them makes the difference to employers. And good people are people who have developed the habit of learning. You are graduates. There are a lot of good people in this room.

The people in this room know that you need that secondary school diploma to do the things that building a career, earning a living, building a community and raising a family requires. For too many years, Ontario was losing one out of every three secondary school students. One out of three students didn’t finish their secondary school.

Today, more than seventy percent of Ontario secondary school students graduate. It’s better, and today, you’re raising that average just a bit, but it needs to be better still. Our province’s target in the next few years is to get that average up to 85 percent, or about five out of six students finishing secondary school.

If we in Ontario are to continue to go head-to-head against the rest of the world, we need a smart work force. Because smart is what it takes to make it today.

Muscle work, low-skill work, and repetition work has already gone to where muscle, low-skill labour and monotonous work are cheap. Places like Ontario do well when our working people can change when the times do, when the tools they use change, and when they need to learn new things as their job changes. Places like Ontario need people like you who can set a goal, stick to it and get the job done.

If it sounds like life will be a challenge, it’s because it will. It isn’t supposed to be easy, and overcoming the hard part is what teaches you to believe in yourself, to motivate others, and to succeed when so-called smart people say there’s no way you will ever do it.

This evening is the first step. As the Chinese say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Life is a journey, not a destination. Take time to enjoy the stops along the way. As the Premier says to us often, don’t let the high points get you too excited, and don’t let the low points get you too depressed.

Do things that you believe in. Be the kind of friend that you’d like to have yourself. Give your trust wisely, and be generous with it when you do. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, because anybody who says they’ve never made any has probably not learned too much.

And as I said at the beginning, remember to enjoy the nice moments along the journey, because most of them only happen once. This is one of those moments.

You came to West Credit as boys and girls. You are leaving as young men and women. You’ve graduated. You’ve made all of Ontario proud. Well done.

Thank you.