More than 70,000 children in Ontario seek publicly funded autism support

TORONTO — More than 70,000 children seek support through the Ontario Autism Program, but fewer than 15,000 of them receive funding for basic therapies, the province’s Financial Accountability Office said in a report Wednesday.

The Progressive Conservative government has more than doubled the budget for the Ontario Autism Program, now to $720 million, but it only funds a few thousand more children for basic services than the program under the former Liberal government in 2018.

Autism Coalition of Ontario president Alina Cameron said the government somehow doubled the budget and made the program worse.

“They’ve built something that only serves one in five kids, and they want the community to celebrate that. When you look at it from our perspective, most of the kids are not going to get care anytime soon,” she said.

“If they had just invested in the program that was there instead of blowing it up, there would be a lot more kids getting what they need right now.”

According to an earlier FAO report, about 10,365 children received needs-based therapy in 2018-19, but the current government stopped enrolling children in core therapy as it redesigned a new program in 2019.

It was forced to go back to the drawing board when families said its new program wouldn’t meet the needs of most children, and it didn’t begin enrolling children in its new program until 2022.

The government’s justification in 2019 for canceling the Liberals’ program was that there was a waiting list of 23,000 children. It has doubled now. Families in the liberal program said they waited two or three years to access therapy, but families in more recent years reported much longer waits.

Not all children enrolled in the program expect core services — which fund applied behavior analysis, speech pathology, occupational therapy and mental health services — but the Ontario Autism Coalition says most need these services to varying degrees.

At the end of last year, 70,176 children were enrolled in the program, FAO reported on Wednesday.

Figures obtained by The Canadian Press through a freedom of information request show that as of the end of March, 14,886 children were receiving funding for basic services. The $720 million budget would be enough to provide 12,629 children with full annual funding for basic therapy, FAO said.

That number also doesn’t necessarily represent how many children are actually receiving publicly funded therapy, said Cameron of the Ontario Autism Coalition, because there are many families with money in hand but nowhere to spend it due to a lack of available therapy providers .

The NDP asked Children, Community and Social Services Minister Michael Parsa during question period on Wednesday about the percentage of children receiving therapy, and he praised the program’s success.

“After the previous NDP-backed government failed the people of this province, this government, under Premier Ford, said we’re not going to stay with the status quo,” he said.

“This program that we have now is built by the community for the community.”

NDP Leader Marit Stiles said the government has made a mess of a program it promised to fix and could help more children if it didn’t spend $225 million to get out of a contract early The Beer Store to put beer and wine in the corner. shops.

“They have money for that, but they don’t have money to spend on getting kids off the autism waiting list or more educational assistants for our special needs kids in the schools,” she said.

Liberal critic John Fraser said the government needed to listen to families about what needs to be fixed with the program.

“They have increased the amount of money, but the waiting list continues to grow,” he said. “So are they actually doing the right thing? I mean, it’s one thing to say, “I’m spending all this money,” but if a child isn’t getting the services they need…it’s not benefiting that family. .”

The Ontario Autism Coalition has expressed concern about the needs assessment program’s determination. It involves families spending up to four hours on the phone with autism program administrators telling them about their child’s needs, and that information is then used to assess how much funding they should receive.

But the process is repeated annually, and the document obtained by The Canadian Press through a freedom of information request shows that more than 26 per cent of completed needs assessments are reassessments.

Annual evaluations aren’t necessary, Cameron said, because once a child is in therapy, their provider does an evaluation every six months, and the situation prevents new children from enrolling because it takes up program administrators’ time.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on June 5, 2024.

Allison Jones, Canadian Press