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Rick Byers

  • MPP
  • Member of Provincial Parliament
  • Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound
  • Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario
  • Ontario
  • Suite 105 345 8th Street E Owen Sound, ON N4K 1L3
  • tel: 519-371-2421
  • fax: 519-371-0953
  • Rick.Byers@pc.ola.org

  • Government Page
  • Mar/27/23 10:00:00 a.m.
  • Re: Bill 85 

I thank the member for the question. Yes, I certainly enjoyed our visits to various parts of Ontario, be it Kenora on January 9 or Sault Ste. Marie or Sudbury or Peterborough, Windsor, Kingston.

The member talked about choices. Well, I’ll tell you the choices that our government is making. Infrastructure spending—a record of $184.4 billion over 10 years. That’s a choice that will matter not only to this generation but to the next. Record spending in health care—has gone up from $74.9 billion to $81 billion over the next three years, spending $15.3 billion.

Those are the choices that our government made, and I’m very proud to be a part of those choices. And I hope this House supports the bill.

Seniors are a priority for this government in so many ways. You just saw the increase in the GAINS program, which is so successful—another 100,000 low-income seniors will be on that program this year. That is back to supporting seniors. And we’re increasing our health care spending overall, as I mentioned before and I’ll keep mentioning over and over and over again—record health care spending for our seniors. We care about them, their families, and we’ll keep caring about them, because we want to make sure we have the best health care system on the planet, which we will continue to invest in—so those are the supports for seniors that I’m very proud to be a part of this government and support.

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  • Dec/5/22 10:10:00 a.m.
  • Re: Bill 36 

I thank the member for her great question. It’s so important, how we’re supporting seniors, and this government is doing that in a number of different ways. One of the things we’re doing immediately is to help vulnerable seniors by proposing to double the Guaranteed Annual Income System payment, GAINS—that’s right, double those payments—starting next month in January 2023. It would support about 200,000 of Ontario’s lowest-income seniors. This is such an important measure, and it’s going to those that need it. This is what this government has done with these targeted measures in the fall economic statement to benefit those most in need.

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