Revisionist history over there. ODSP maxes out at just $1,300 a month—just $1,300 to cover housing, utilities and food in the middle of a housing and affordability crisis. Food bank use is at an all-time high for working people. It’s up 40% from last year. The federal benefit was always supposed to be a top-up to the provincial program to help people make ends meet, yet the Conservatives want to use it as an excuse to make more cuts.

To the Premier: Why is your government taking away vulnerable people’s safety net at a time when things are more expensive than ever before?

To the Premier: Will you commit to doubling the ODSP today?

Interjections.

I want to thank the member for Spadina–Fort York for your comments. I really appreciate that you took this opportunity to speak specifically about ODSP and OW and the doubling of ODSP rates. And I want to thank you for taking me out with you on food deliveries during the pandemic. Actually, I’m sure you would be pleased to have others join you at some point. I think we met some of the folks that you mentioned.

But I wanted to mention one other thing: My experience in working with people in my community who are on ODSP is that the other piece of this is that ODSP is punitive, as you pointed out, but also how often ODSP is clawed back and, in many cases, quite arbitrarily, and how often people who are on ODSP have to fight and fight and fight, and how few of the case workers can stick around for more than a year because they can’t handle the pressure and how depressing it is to be constantly clawing back on people’s already meagre payments.

I wonder if the member would care to comment on that and also whether this 5% really—what that’s actually going to look like in terms of impact on the lives of the people he was mentioning.