Corrections & Accuracy Policy

Direct answer

Corrections & Accuracy Policy · Verified August 21, 2026

Data Verification Methodology

End The Wait Ontario publishes data related to the Ontario Autism Program waitlist, provincial funding allocations, and service availability. We verify statistical claims against primary-source material before publication and disclose uncertainty when primary evidence is unavailable.

FOI requests

MCCSS Ontario Autism Program figures, May 13, 2026, obtained by the Ontario Autism Coalition under Freedom of Information; earlier OAC releases through March 4, 2026 and CBC News reports through 2026-01-07. Note: Bill 97 (passed April 23, 2026) amended FIPPA to exclude ministerial office records from its scope, which may affect the range of future disclosures.

FAO and Auditor General reports

independent analyses of program spending, performance, and service delivery.

Hansard and committee transcripts

official legislative records for ministerial and committee statements.

Peer-reviewed research and WHO publications

clinical evidence used to contextualize intervention timing and outcomes.

Official data portals

Ontario Data Catalogue, Statistics Canada, and other published government datasets.

We do not invent, round, or extrapolate figures without explicitly saying so. When a number is estimated or derived, the method is documented beside the claim.

Correction Process

If we discover a material factual error, we update the page as soon as reasonably possible and note the correction. Material errors include inaccurate statistics, misquoted sources, or claims that materially change a reader's understanding of the issue.

1. We review the claim against the original source material.
2. We update the affected page and related snippets when needed.
3. We note the correction date when the change is substantive.
4. We propagate the fix to derivative content where feasible.

Correction Log

Substantive corrections are logged here with the date, what changed, and the source used to verify the fix. Wording, formatting, and citation-plumbing fixes are not listed.

• August 21, 2026 — Prior-year OAP budget figure: Several pages, including the real waitlist number page, stated the province's prior-year (2025-26) autism-program budget as $571M. That figure is the funding gap for that year, not the budget allocation — the actual allocation was $779M. Corrected sitewide; the two figures are now tracked separately so they cannot be conflated again. Source: Ministry budget allocations cross-referenced with the FAO's 2020 gap methodology.
• August 21, 2026 — AccessOAP $57.9M administration figure, attribution: Roughly twenty references across the site — including Never Once Examined, AccessOAP Explained, and the newsroom — credited this figure to the Financial Accountability Office. It is not an FAO figure. It comes from a Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services spending breakdown, obtained under freedom-of-information request by The Trillium (Village Media) and published July 4, 2024. All references now credit The Trillium's FOI reporting. The related $691.2M total program-spending figure is genuinely FAO-sourced (Spending Plan Review, June 2024) and was left as attributed.
• August 21, 2026 — Invitation cohort year: Five pages, including how many children are waiting, stated that current-round Ontario Autism Program invitations were reaching families who had registered in 2019 or 2019–2020. The verified figure is August 2021. Source: Ontario Autism Coalition, July 2026.
• August 21, 2026 — March 2026 backlog figures, date label: Two pages presented a backlog calculation based on the March 2026 data snapshot without a date label attached, which read as describing the present. Relabelled to show the snapshot date. The arithmetic was correct for that date and was not changed.
• August 21, 2026 — Autistic-adult chronic pain statistic, withdrawn: Autism and chronic pain and autism and hypermobility/EDS stated that “up to 70%” of autistic adults report chronic pain, citing Lipsker et al. (2021, Pain Medicine). An internal source re-check on August 7–8, 2026 found the cited PMID resolves to an unrelated dermatology paper; no matching autism/chronic-pain paper by that author and year could be confirmed. The figure and citation were withdrawn and replaced with a qualitative statement. No replacement figure was substituted.
• August 21, 2026 — Five statistics narrowed to what their sources support: Figures on sleep-onset prevalence, melatonin effect size, teen loneliness, autistic-adult employment rate, and undiagnosed autism in adults over 50 were stated more precisely than their cited sources support. Each now states the finding qualitatively where a precise figure could not be confirmed; the underlying sources are correct and were not changed. A separate citation (Malow et al.) had its publication year corrected from 2019 to 2020.
• August 21, 2026 — Citation appendix rendering: A lookup bug in the citation system caused 233 pages, including the facts page, to silently render an empty source list for some or all of their cited facts, with the page otherwise appearing fully sourced. Fixed; affected pages now display their complete citation list.

Corrections Ledger

The log above is written in prose. This ledger is the structured, machine-readable record behind it: each entry ties one correction, clarification, or update to a specific claim we track in our data. It is append-only: entries are never edited or deleted, only added to.

Review Cadence

High-impact pages are reviewed on a recurring basis, especially when tied to FOI releases, budget updates, or ministry announcements. Evergreen explainers are reviewed periodically and refreshed when evidence or policy changes.

If you think a piece is about you

Some of what we publish is first-person testimony about things that happened to us. A few of those accounts describe people we have deliberately chosen not to name, because naming them is not necessary to make the point and would expose people who have no right of reply here.

Withholding a name creates a different risk, and we take it seriously. Readers guess. Sometimes they guess wrong, and a person who had nothing to do with the events finds themselves suspected of something they did not do. That harm is real even though we never printed their name, and it is ours to fix.

What we commit to

• We do not confirm or deny who anyone is. Not to journalists, not to readers, not to the person asking. This rule is absolute and it is a protection, not an evasion: if we denied it for four people and went quiet on the fifth, the silence would identify them.
• We will review the text. If you tell us a passage points at you, we will look at what in the writing creates that pull and whether it can be removed or generalised without gutting the account. Where it can, we change it.
• We will publish a general statement that people have been wrongly identified and that readers should not speculate, if that would help.
• We will correct anything factually wrong, whether or not you are the person described.

What we will not do

• Remove accurate material because someone would prefer it were not published.
• Identify a source, or confirm the identity of anyone described.
• Treat a complaint as proof. We check claims against the underlying record (recordings, documents, correspondence) before changing anything.

How we respond

• We acknowledge within three business days.
• We give a substantive answer within fourteen days, or tell you why it is taking longer.
• Changes are logged with a date and a note saying what changed. We do not edit silently.

Reporting an Error

If you believe something on the site is inaccurate, email us with the page URL, the statement in question, and any supporting documentation you want us to review.