Wait continues for Ontario's needs-based autism program

There are now over 51,000 children on the waitlist for autism services in Ontario and advocates say people can’t wait for a needs-based program any longer.

Julia Ritchie is the founder of Northern Ontario Autism Alliance and a mom of two children, both of whom are on the autism spectrum. Her daughter was diagnosed four years ago and in that time has made great strides through therapy.

"She is doing pretend play, she reaches out to kids at the park. When she was two, she was completely non-verbal. She had about two words she would say, 'paw' for Paw Patrol and 'no' for something she didn’t want, and now she is reading," Ritchie said.

"She’s doing math. She’s just grown so beautifully through therapy and that fact that other families may not be able to access that or access that for long periods of times, years, maybe even a decade, is just heartbreaking."

When the Ford government took over in 2018, Ritchie said families were promised an overhaul of the autism services program put in by the previous Wynne government. But for the last several years, she said they have only received interim funding, something she said isn’t working while families wait. "Sometimes they do receive that budget and just have nowhere to spend it because of where they live or that the service providers who are in their area have such long waitlists," Ritchie said.

Sudbury MPP Jamie West said it’s embarrassing that a program isn’t in place after more than three years.

"These families, God bless them for being so patient, really deserve better than this," West said.

"When you say 'we’re going to fix the programming,' you scrap the old one and three and a half years later you don’t have a new one in place - all you have is the name of it - you only have 600 kids registered. Like 600 kids is a drop in the bucket for 51,000."

Krystle Caputo, the communications director for the Ontario Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services told CTV News in an statement the Ontario Autism Program was broken when the progressive conservative party took over.

"It wasn’t serving children with autism and it wasn’t supporting families. Fewer than one-third of children were receiving services and the rest received nothing," Caputo said, stating that is why they doubled the program's funding to $600-million, calling it "the largest investment in autism services in Ontario’s history."

"That investment means that we are now supporting more than 40,000 children – almost five times more children than served under the previous program," she added.

"We also created the Ontario Autism Advisory Panel, an expert advisory group made up of parents, clinicians, researchers, providers, and self-advocates who provided our government with recommendations to form a truly needs-based Ontario Autism Program."

Ritchie said the alliance is being told the new program will be rolled out sometime this fall and that the provincial government hopes to help 8,000 people by the end of the year. However, she said she's not confident that will happen given the multiple delays that have already occurred.

"We remain determined to get the Ontario Autism Program right, and that means rolling out services thoughtfully while also building capacity in the workforce to provide the support families need," Caputo said.

"We are fixing a broken system and we will ensure that no child is left unsupported."