Jason O'Neill, who owns several McDonald's franchises in the Barrie area, will tell you it's the happiest day of the year.
Local Hospitals will, too, as they reap some benefits from McHappy Day today.
A portion of all sales today will be donated to hospitals and Ronald MacDonald House charities.
In Barrie, funds will flow to the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) expansion at RVH.
Of the 2,000 babies born every year at RVH, one in 10 will be cared for in the NICU, which is decades old and in need of renovation.
"There's not enough space for the number of babies that need the service, and the space that we do have is not large enough," said Pam Ross, head of the RVH Foundation. " Right now, each family has 35 square feet, which is smaller than some closets. And the standard of care is five times that size."
The challenge, said Ross, is there's no privacy. Parents are unable to have private conversations with doctors and nurses; they're trying to breastfeed with no privacy. And, in some cases, families with twins become separated when there's space for just one of the twins in the NICO, and the other is taken to another hospital, often in Toronto.
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In the past 11 years, RVH has received more than a quarter of a million dollars in funding from McHappy Day, for the NICU and child and youth mental health.
In addition, says Trevor McKee, owner-operator of the Bayfield Street McDonald's and another in Wal Mart, 220 families from the Barrie area were able to access the services of Ronald McDonald House in Toronto.
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