Well, clearly our investment of a billion dollars in our most recent budget speaks to exactly why we want to improve home care in homes, where people want to be able to recover and recuperate.

In our last budget, a billion dollars over the next three years—but what does that actually give you? In your community, in the case of Robin’s son, the funding will support an estimated 28,000 post-acute surgical patients and an estimated 21,000 patients with complex health conditions every year by providing 739,000 nursing visits. That’s 739,000 nursing visits that never happened under the previous governments.

We are making the investments because we understand it’s not just about hospitals. It’s not just about primary care and long-term care. It’s also about community care, because there are many thousands of people who want to do that recovery in their own home with appropriate supports. We’re providing those appropriate supports.

One very specific example: I’ve talked about complex health conditions, but over two million hours of personal support services will now be provided in Ontario in communities like yours to make sure that your constituents, your residents have that quality of life in their own home with their families.

Sometimes what happens in a budget is the government will cherry-pick certain lines about it and say, “Hey, you don’t support the whole budget. How come you don’t support this one part?” And that is fruitless.

The reality, though, is that when you’re living in poverty, when you’re living on OW or ODSP, and you tell somebody, “You are going to get a tax credit,” you’re ignoring the fact that most people who live in poverty don’t file their taxes. They don’t. And so, most people, they use their taxes as a bank account, as a savings account—sorry, through the Speaker. So what they do is they don’t file because they wait for their fridge to break down, because every penny you have, you spend. So telling somebody that, “You’re going to live in poverty for 12 months out of the year, but three months after that, you’re going to get tax relief,” is not hope for them.

What they need is food on the table today, money in their pockets today. They need to make ends meet today. So it’s not that it’s a bad idea, but it’s a “yes and” conversation. Let’s give them the tax relief and let’s put money in their pockets today.