Lisa Gretzky MPP, for Windsor West

 QUEEN’S PARK – MPP Lisa Gretzky (Windsor West) demanded answers from Doug Ford in question period Tuesday as to why Maximus, a for-profit American company with a record of poor performance, is being considered for a contract to provide employment services to Ontarians receiving social assistance. She released the following statement:
 
“Social assistance recipients have been neglected by the Ford government and by the Liberals before them. Recipients of social assistance with disabilities live in deep poverty, without enough money for housing or food. Doug Ford shamefully refuses to raise assistance rates, leaving millions of Ontarians to barely scrape by.
 
Instead of providing adequate support, Ford chooses to give foreign owned for-profit companies with terrible track records, like Maximus, millions of dollars in a bid to push people with disabilities off of assistance and into jobs they can’t physically do.
 
This is the same company that caused serious harm to people with disabilities in Kansas because of bad training and oversight, huge backlogs and lost documents. Maximus was also fined at least three times in British Columbia, and cost the province almost 50 per cent more than was originally projected.
 
Ford must stop privatizing employment services and prioritizing the profits of foreign for-profit companies. Instead, Ford should immediately raise social assistance rates and lift people receiving Ontario Works or Ontario Disability Support Program out of poverty. Andrea Horwath and the NDP are the only party that will raise the rates. ”