Children and Youth Services Minister Mary Anne Chambers said the province is doing its level best to provide as many kids as possible with Intensive Behavioural Intervention therapy - an effective treatment that comes with an enormous price tag.
The funding means more than 1,100 children in Ontario will receive IBI therapy, which can cost as much as $80,000 a year per child. It also brings the province's spending on autism to $115 million a year, said Chambers, who acknowledged there's more to do.
"In the past two years we have doubled our funding of autism services, and with this new announcement we will have a 105 per cent increase in the number of kids receiving treatment," she told a news conference.
"But I know there is still more that needs to be done to reach all of the young people and families who need help."
Last June, the government made a similar announcement and allocated funding to help another 120 kids, but Chambers admitted Thursday that 30 of those spots have not yet been filled.
That's being addressed with more money for training and recruitment of therapists to help with a shortage of capable workers across the province, she said.
"If we didn't graduate 101 new therapists in the spring of last year, that would be 101 fewer therapists we had out there. The class of therapists this year is 109 across the province. That's again going to enable us to continue our investment in services."
Critics, including Conservative member Lisa MacLeod and the NDP's Shelley Martel, slammed the Liberals for allowing the waiting list to continue to grow.
"Let's be blunt: the spaces announced today don't even keep up with the growth on the waiting list, never mind eliminating the waiting list entirely," Martel said.
In the last nine months of 2006, that list grew by 70 per cent - from 753 children to more than 1,200, she added.
"If you look at the wait list through the course of the Liberals being in office, it grew from 89 in March 2004 to over 1,200 in December 2006. That's a 1,300 per cent growth in the wait list."
Stakeholder groups like Autism Ontario and the Ontario Autism Coalition applauded the announcement - even though they agree it only scratches the surface.
"This is good news; the key thing that happened today is there was a recognition of the expanding waiting list," said Margaret Spoelstra, executive director of Autism Ontario, a charity organization that's campaigned on behalf of families for 32 years.
She said no one believes the problem can be fixed overnight, no matter how much money is thrown at it.
"You can't just say, 'Tomorrow there will be no more waiting lists, everyone gets service,"' Spoelstra said. "It's not like there's an entire repository of trained individuals in the province waiting for a job in the field. We need to make sure that not only are those kids moving into those spaces, but there are actually people who can do the work and are skilled or qualified."
The government is making a mistake by not allowing IBI specialists in schools and not helping more families fund private therapy, Martel said.
"If you don't get the service to these kids they will end up in group homes, they will end up in institutions, they will end up in jail," she said. "And the cost of that will be far, far greater to Ontario than the costs of providing the funds to clear this waiting list and give IBI to the kids who need it."
Spoelstra said IBI therapists are needed in schools to ensure parents don't have to keep their kids out of classes to get the special support they need or because they're not ready to interact with schoolmates.
"If you're a parent and you have the choice between sending your child to school or continuing to receive services and support and treatment from a trained therapist (at home), that's a tough choice to make," she said.
"Families are finding the level of support that they had and the training that was present with a therapist at home is not available in a school setting."
Chambers said the issue of getting IBI therapists into schools must be developed with the Education Ministry, and they are awaiting a report due at the end of the month for guidance on how to proceed.
At the federal level, the government said in November that it will sponsor an autism symposium in 2007.
The government will also establish a research chair focusing on effective treatment and intervention for the condition, explore the possibility of developing an autism surveillance program through the Public Health Agency of Canada, create a page dedicated to autism on the Health Canada website, and designate the Health Policy Branch of Health Canada as the lead agency for actions related to autism at the level.
And in May of last year, Senator Jim Munson said he was launching an inquiry into the plight faced by parents of children with autism.
"Where is the universality in health care that Canadians are so proud of? It's not to be found if you have autism," he said at the time.
