I’d like to welcome Andrea Hatala from the Ontario ODSP Action Coalition and to thank her for joining us in this morning’s press conference.

My question is for the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services. This summer, over 230 community and social service organizations wrote to the government calling for them to double the social assistance rates. Rates for Ontario Works and ODSP have been frozen for four years, and inflation is at a 40-year high. The government’s 5% increase to ODSP and nothing for Ontario Works recipients won’t even be close enough to cover the cost of rising basic needs.

Will the government recognize that more needs to be done to support social assistance recipients and double the rates for ODSP and Ontario Works today?

Thank you to the member opposite for the question. Our government is continuing to support those who need it most, whether it’s people who need job re-skilling and retraining or people who are unable to work. That’s exactly why we increased the ODSP rate to a historic 5% and aligned it with inflation: because we know that high inflationary times are troublesome and make it that much more difficult for people.

We’ve also got the discretionary benefit. We’ve created the LIFT and the CARE tax credits. We increased the rates at the very beginning. If you look at our track record throughout the years that we’ve been here, we started with an increase that the Liberals never did, and then we created the social services relief fund of a billion dollars for people during a very difficult time. All the while, we created programs to help people: the micro-credentialing, the energy and property tax relief, the Ontario Trillium fund. The list goes on. We are continuing to work on this. We know that people need support, and we’re continuing to do just that.

I want to thank the opposition for the question. We’ll always be there for the most vulnerable, always have been. The previous government ignored ODSP for 15 years. One of the first things we did when we took office: We increased ODSP. And now we’re doing it again. We’re increasing it by 5%. This is the largest increase in over a decade. As the NDP and Liberals stood there and starved these people, we increased it by 5%—the largest in a full decade.

We’ll always fight for the people that need our help. That’s the reason we lowered the taxes for 1.7 million lower-income people. They aren’t going to have the burden of the tax that the previous government put on. We lowered the gas tax by 5.7 cents, on top of the 4.3 cents and—