(Canada) Toronto: >70K autistic children on waitlist for services

Jan 30, 2024, CP24: Toronto: More than 70K children with autism are on waitlist for services  https://www.cp24.com/video/2025/01/30/more-than-70k-children-with-autism-are-on-waitlist-for-services/  

Video

Parent: I hope we clear the waitlist. There are over 70,000 children waitlisted for the Ontario Autism Program and core clinical services.

And children like Regis who register in 2022, three years into his wait, we have no idea when he’ll finally get speech and language, OT, ABA and the psychological services he has needed now since he was two years old.

She was asked about government funding.

Our experience has been that nothing has materialized. He has been waitlisted. He has been prevented from accessing speech and language therapy; things that would help him succeed at school. He’s currently not able to go to school for a myriad of reasons.\

Early intervention, we hear a lot about it, and that might have supported him to navigate a school day successfully.

She was asked about hopefully changes from the government.

I hope for change. I really hope that we start delivering meaningful service to children who need it in a timely way. We can’t just put an indefinite wait for kids, six years, seven years. Nobody even knows, are we halfway through our wait? We have no idea. Some clarities—it sounds like a broken record from where I sit, where we talk about program like the Entry to School program.

Well, Regis went to Entry to School, and he still can’t navigate a stay at school.

She was asked about her life as a parent.

It is so challenging. He’s the greatest kid in the world. He is just wonderful, but he has complex needs. He has speech and language needs. He is not a fluent communicator consistently, so he uses an assistive device.

There are so many limitations. We wait for our regional care provider, to make it to the top of the list there, and then we’re waiting for school-based rehab at school a year and a half.  . . .

It’s paving the way for his lifetime now.  Early intervention can’t just be conceptual. We have to actually do it. We can’t talk about honoring human rights and that just be a concept. We have to actually deliver on inclusion and access and all of these things. It’s a really big conversation. )