Thank you very much for that question. It gives me the opportunity to share that 6.7 million Canadians received the one-time payment for seniors as part of our government's commitment to support seniors during the pandemic.
Seniors who were eligible for OAS received $300, and those who were eligible for the guaranteed income supplement received an additional $200. That meant, if you include that with the GST top-up, that a low-income couple would have received over $1,500 of tax-free support to help them through additional pandemic costs.
I just want you to know that the department was working to make sure that all those who were eligible as of June 2020 would have received this one-time payment. They were continuing to work on applications that came through between that time and September to make sure that anybody who was eligible received the payment. It was a tremendous support for seniors during a challenging time.
That was just one piece of the support that we are providing for seniors. The other aspect was to make sure that they had the community supports in place, because sometimes it wasn't about money; it was about getting the help they needed. If they were stuck in their home, they needed services and supports to be able to get around. That's why we provided an additional $20 million to the new horizons for seniors program. We provided an ability for organizations to pivot their programs to help seniors in a different way than what they had proposed in the prior year's application [Technical difficulty—Editor].