After announcing the changes in February, aimed at clearing the long waiting list for the programme, but resulting in the potential loss of access to the service for many families, the government eventually partly reversed its reforms.
[1][2] In 2014, while a city councillor in Toronto, Ford came under criticism after opposing a group home for developmentally disabled people, including those with autism, in a west Etobicoke neighbourhood.
[8] In November 2018, along with other cuts such as the 2018 Franco-Ontarian Black Thursday, the Ford government announced that it would be eliminating the Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth.
The reforms would also establish a government agency charged with assessing funding eligibility for families and providing them advice on which services to purchase.
[23] As well, critics pointed out that the educational assistants in schools could not serve as substitutes for therapists and were often already forced to pay out of their own pockets to receive training for their job.
After the reforms were announced, the Toronto Sun published an editorial defended the government, stating that "MacLeod's solution isn't perfect; not everyone's happy.
[27] In mid-February, McLeod issued an apology over accusations of bullying a group of Ontario Association for Behaviour Analysis experts, after having threatened "four long years' for the organization" if it didn't publicly support the government's reforms.
[28] In late-February, after Progressive Conservative MPP Randy Hillier taunted the protestors in the Legislative Assembly, Ford suspended him indefinitely from the PC caucus.
[45] In September 2019, Child and Community Resources, a major autism-service provider in Northern Ontario, announced that it would no longer be able to offer therapy to new families and that it had cut 90 positions over the previous year.
The centre blamed the government's reforms for the cuts, with executive director Sherry Fournier stating that "my worry has been from the start that the north will feel this first.
Some of the families had previously sued the then-Liberal government over a decade earlier, the judge ruling that an age six funding cap was discriminatory.
[47] In late October 2019, the autism advisory panel released its report, calling for a number of changes to the Ontario Autism Program, including the expansion of core services, the provision of funding based on an individual child's needs, the end of the use of seclusion rooms in schools, and each family being assigned a care co-ordinator with the goal of helping them navigate the government programme.
[52][53] In December 2020, the government released a series of guidelines for independent agencies wishing to be contracted to run Ontario's autism program.
The guidelines came under criticism for allegedly ignoring the recommendations of the autism advisory panel and for taking final decisions out of the hands of medical professionals.
However, families still criticised the government for falling short of the promises it had made, with the head of the Ontario Autism Coalition stating that "there's a lot of disappointment in the community — even though they are calling it needs-based, it is lacking.
The School Board stated that, with changes made by the government to the Children Treatment Network, it felt it had enough resources to fully operate autism services without working with an outside provider.