Sometimes things don’t go as planned, but when it comes to the Ford government’s handling of the autism program, again and again, they make unenforced errors and break their promises. Case in point is their rollout of the newly designed “needs based” Ontario Autism Program. The government hasn’t met any…

It has been over a month since Minister Todd Smith delivered his February 2021 update on the Ontario Autism Program (OAP). In it he revealed what his pilot program will look like for 600 kids and what he is doing in the interim for everyone else, however there were many…

The February 3 Ontario Autism Program (OAP) announcement turned out to be a more of a publicity stunt, a way for Minister Todd Smith to get out in front of the two year anniversary of Lisa MacLeod’s introduction to Childhood Budgets on February 6, 2019 that sparked outrage from parents…

Those that tuned into the Government of Ontario’s live stream of Minister Todd Smith’s autism program announcement on February 3 were left baffled as the live stream came into an in-progress press announcement. 2 minutes later there were no further questions and the live stream ended. The timing of this…

New details have emerged on how the new Ontario Autism Program will be structured and it has many in the autism community alarmed. Social media attention to a call for applications for the Ontario Autism Program Independent Intake Organization have left many to speculate that the program is returning to…

Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office (FAO) has published their financial review on autism services. You can read the whole report here. Here are my 10 initial thoughts when reading the report: $608M wasn’t actually spent on services in FY19/20, more like $337M plus $97M in liabilities for the money doled out…

Update: After posting this article on the morning of July 17, hours later the Ministry tweeted that they revised their monthly numbers. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The ministry sent me a message in response to this article to check out their revision. The revision was due to double counting…

The latest Ontario Autism Program monthly numbers published on the Ontario government website featured some statistics that made me say hmm. I always appreciate when Patrick Monaghan revises the government’s “in service” figures to separate out the number of children receiving Childhood Budgets versus those legacy OAP children still in…

At Todd Smith’s December 17th news conference, the Minister of Children, Community and Social Services announced that his ministry would not make good on it’s promise to have a needs-based autism program live by April 2020. …