Doug Ford has nearly doubled the number of parliamentary assistants\u00a0giving 31 MPPs a 14 per cent pay hike while firing education and health care workers. Doug Ford appointed 31 Conservative MPPs to be parliamentary assistants on Wednesday. The MPPs will each get an extra $16,300 on top of their MPP salary.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe gravy train is getting crowded,\u201d said NDP MPP Taras Natyshak (Essex). \u201cUnder Ford, hundreds of health care and education workers have gotten pink slips, and every public sector working person will see their salary throttled to one per cent or less this year. \u201cBut for his insiders, money\u2019s no object and there\u2019s no such thing as a government too big. The party with taxpayers\u2019 money is a real rager.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Last week, Ford grew the size of his cabinet by 33 per cent, appointing more cabinet ministers than any other province in the country. Now, he\u2019s growing the parliamentary assistant pool by 72 per cent, to 31 from 18. The Liberal government had 23 parliamentary assistants at last count. \u201cDoes Doug Ford\u2019s cabinet actually need this much help? Or is Doug Ford using public money to buy the happiness and loyalty of a caucus that\u2019s been reportedly unhappy with him?\u201d Natyshak asked. The party\u2019s house leaders, speakers and other roles also get a pay bump, so there are now only six PC MPPs who are not earning an extra paycheque on top of their MPP pay. \u201cHow bad do you have to tick off Doug Ford to be in that group of six Conservative MPPs that aren\u2019t getting a special appointment and extra public money from Doug Ford?\u201d Natyshak asked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Doug Ford has nearly doubled the number of parliamentary assistants\u00a0giving 31 MPPs a 14 per cent pay hike while firing education and health care workers. Doug Ford appointed 31 Conservative MPPs to be parliamentary assistants on Wednesday. The MPPs will each get an extra $16,300 on top of their MPP salary. \u201cThe gravy train …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[2106],"class_list":["post-22556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-provincial","tag-parliamentary-assistants-with-special-responsibilities"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-21 19:46:27","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22557,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22556\/revisions\/22557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wawa-news.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}