May 25th, 2020

Promised pandemic pay needs to flow now: NDP

QUEEN'S PARK — Official Opposition Leader Andrea Horwath issued the following statement in response to a letter from 11 health care CEOs to Premier Doug Ford asking for the province to release the pandemic pay bump it promised a month ago:

"Workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 battle are putting their lives on the line every day, yet many of these workers — the PSWs, paramedics and many others who are seeing us through the pandemic — may be struggling to make ends meet thanks to low pay.

NDP MPP offices have been flooded with calls and e-mails from essential workers who deserve a pandemic pay top-up, yet have failed to see that money flow, whether because the Ford government neglected to include them on its list or because they are on the list, but have not seen a single dollar of the wages they were promised.

It is unacceptable for Doug Ford to call frontline workers heroes, then fail to give them the small raise he promised a month ago. Frontline workers should receive their pandemic pay immediately, retroactive to the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis.

The workers on the front lines deserve so much better from the government."