Thank you to the members opposite for your comments on the budget.

I was genuinely heartened to hear the member from Peterborough–Kawartha spend so much time talking about the importance of people in crisis; I truly agree that that should be a priority for this government. But I was really surprised to hear him say that the budget supports every single person in this province—to begin with, because I can list many people in this province that the budget does not support, but mainly because the budget does not support some of the people who are the most in crisis in our province, which is people who live with disabilities, people who are living on Ontario Works, who are living in such incredibly deep poverty that they are going hungry every day, who are using food banks in record numbers, who are unable to afford rent because the benefits that they are receiving are significantly lower than the rate of rent in the province.

Does the member not agree that, if we genuinely want to help people in crisis, we should start with the 900,000 Ontarians who are living in very deep poverty, and double the rates of Ontario Works and ODSP?

I thank my honourable colleague for the question again.

I wanted to mention that we’re also backing that strategy up with real investments, with funding over $2.9 billion in developmental services, including more than $1.8 billion for residential supports.

Mr. Speaker, thanks to the great work of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and thanks to the Minister of Finance, you saw that, in the budget, $2.2 million will be invested for supportive housing. The minister has said many, many, many times that we are in a housing supply crisis in the province of Ontario—one that affects every single person, one that we’re trying to address, one that the opposition continuously votes against, doesn’t seem to understand. So in order to get housing right for everybody, we need to address the supply crisis that we’re in, and I thank the minister for his leadership on that.