$965M
Ontario allocated $965M to the Ontario Autism Program in 2026-27
Investigation
The number
In 2022, Cardus — an organization that argues for funding independent schools — published a count of Ontario’s independent-school sector. It is careful work, and it is the best public map of the sector that exists. It also answers a question its authors were not asking.
Of roughly 1,445 independent schools in Ontario as of July 2022, 57 emphasize special education. That is 3.9% of the sector. There are 545 religious schools. There are 155 Montessori schools — 2.7 times as many as there are special-education schools.
So when the case for public funding of private schools opens with children who have disabilities, it is opening with the constituency served by about four percent of the schools that would benefit from the precedent.
We want to be precise about what that does and does not establish. It does not establish bad faith, and we are not alleging any. Advocates lead with their strongest argument; that is what advocacy is. What it establishes is narrower and harder to argue with: our children are unusually persuasive in a debate whose outcome would mostly affect other people’s children.
Polling published in January 2026 puts a number on how persuasive. Asked whether government should fund children with special needs at independent schools, 64% of Albertans agreed. Asked whether government should expand education outside the public system generally, support fell to 39%.
The record
Every item here is a public document, published under named authorship. Advocacy of this kind is entirely lawful, and nothing below suggests otherwise.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty
A refundable tax credit for parents paying independent-school tuition, phased in from 10% to 50% of the first $7,000 of tuition — a maximum credit of $3,500 per child once fully phased in. Enacted as O. Reg. 498/01.
Costed at: The government of the day expected to forgo roughly $300 million in tax revenue at full phase-in.
Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government
The incoming government, elected on a promise to cancel the credit, repealed it retroactively to January 1, 2003. Ontario has provided no direct public funding to private schools before or since.
Deani Van Pelt, Ray Pennings and Taylor Jackson
That students with special education needs attending independent schools receive 75% or 50% of the per-pupil special education funding provided to public school students, on the argument that support for a child’s disability should follow the child rather than the school. The paper notes the 75% figure was previously proposed in a 2004 Fraser Institute paper by Hepburn and Mrozek.
Costed at: $78 million to $195 million a year at 75%; $52 million to $130 million at 50%.
Derek Allison, Patricia Allison, Barb Bierman, Justin Cook, Amanda Dervaitis, Tony Kamphuis, Ray Pennings, Ren Siebenga, Deani Van Pelt and Michael Van Pelt
Statutory recognition of independent schools, teachers and students; a streamlined notice-of-intention process; reduced or removed inspection fees; access to EQAO, special-education supports and dual-credit programs; and a ministerial commission on independent schools. It did NOT propose an operating-funding formula, education savings accounts, or vouchers.
Derek J. Allison
Argues Ontario parents have less school choice than parents in other provinces and comparable jurisdictions, and makes the case for publicly supported choice in Ontario. We have not been able to retrieve the full report text, so its specific funding recommendations and cost estimate are not reproduced here.
David Hunt, Anointing Momoh and Deani Van Pelt
Models seven funding approaches for Ontario independent schools — full funding plus the Alberta, Saskatchewan (two variants), British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec models — producing 21 cost estimates across three enrolment scenarios.
Costed at: Net annual cost of $535.2 million to $1.539 billion, which the report frames as roughly 0.3% to 0.8% of Ontario’s then-$186 billion budget.
UN Human Rights Committee
On a communication brought by Arieh Hollis Waldman, whose children attended a Jewish day school, the Committee found that Ontario’s funding of Roman Catholic schools while denying comparable funding to other religious schools was discriminatory under Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, holding that funding one religious group and not another must rest on reasonable and objective criteria. The Committee’s views are not binding in Canadian law, and Ontario did not change its funding. A domestic Charter challenge had already failed in Adler v. Ontario, [1996] 3 S.C.R. 609.
Progressive Conservative leader John Tory
The PC leader campaigned on extending public funding to faith-based schools. The proposal dominated and sank the campaign; the party’s vote share fell and Tory lost his own seat. He later acknowledged the mistake publicly. Advocacy since has been framed largely in equity and fairness terms rather than religious ones.
David Hunt, Joanna DeJong VanHof and Jenisa Los
A typology of Ontario’s independent-school sector, published by an organization that supports funding it. It counts the schools, and in doing so establishes who the sector actually consists of.
Angus Reid Institute
Survey of 516 Alberta adults, fielded January 27–30, 2026. Found 64% support public funding for children with special needs attending an independent school, against 39% support (and 46% opposition) for expanding education outside the public system generally.
The part most pages leave out
We went looking for hidden lobbying, political money, and a government commitment. We did not find them. Publishing that is the reason you can trust the rest of this page.
Searched: Ontario’s Lobbyist Registry and the federal Registry of Lobbyists, for sixteen named organizations and individuals.
No registration was found for any of them on independent-school funding. One federal registration lists a Cardus executive as a client representative for an unrelated organization, and Edvance appears as a coalition organization on a separate federal filing — neither concerns Ontario school funding.
Recorded as “not found”, not as “did not happen”. These registries do not return reliable null results, so absence of a record is not proof of absence.
Searched: Elections Ontario and Elections Canada contribution databases, nine named individuals, 2014 to 2026.
No publicly displayed political contribution was found for any of them. Ontario law has also barred corporate and organizational contributions to parties and candidates since 2017, so even a personal donation could not be attributed to an organization without separate proof.
Recorded as “not found”, not as “did not happen”. These registries do not return reliable null results, so absence of a record is not proof of absence.
Searched: Ontario PC election platforms for 2018, 2022 and 2025.
No mention of independent-school funding, education savings accounts, vouchers, or "funding follows the student" in any of the three. A 2022 pledge to fund students regardless of school type came from the Ontario Party, a different party.
Searched: Ontario government bills and private members’ bills, 2018 to August 2026.
No bill was found that would create independent-school operating grants, vouchers, or education savings accounts.
Recorded as “not found”, not as “did not happen”. These registries do not return reliable null results, so absence of a record is not proof of absence.
Searched: Public records of ministerial meetings, Hansard, and pre-budget consultation appearances, 2018 to 2026.
One ministerial meeting was documented — Cardus with then-Education Minister Stephen Lecce in December 2021 — and its published subject was a child-care agreement, not school funding. One meeting with a backbench MPP was recorded in Hansard in April 2024. No pre-budget appearance about independent-school funding was found.
Searched: Published Ontario government policy on private schools.
Unchanged. Private schools in Ontario operate as independent businesses or non-profits and receive no direct provincial funding. That has been the position throughout the period examined.
Against ourselves
There is an obvious theory here — that special education is a deliberate opening wedge for something broader. We tested it. It does not hold up, and here is why.
If special education were the wedge, it would have come first somewhere. It did not.
General funding: Limited aid from 1965 (textbooks, transportation, shared facilities), rising to operating grants worth 50% of public per-pupil expenditure by 1997–98.
Special education: Special-needs support is an add-on grant to schools already funded.
General funding: Public funding of private schools from 1967, beginning at $100 per student.
Special education: Designated Special Education Private Schools are a later designation layered on the existing framework.
General funding: Independent Schools Support Act, 1977 — initial grants of 9% or 30% of the per-student operating grant.
Special education: Private schools serving only special-education students were designated as Special Education Services beginning in 1991.
General funding: Associate schools and historical high schools funded from the mid-1990s; Qualified Independent Schools added in 2012.
Special education: Funding categories are defined by religion, history or general status — not by special education.
None of this makes the 57-of-1,445 figure less true. It means the right conclusion to draw from it is about who a policy would actually serve — not about what anyone secretly intends.
Corrections
These circulate publicly. Some of them would have been useful to us. They are wrong, and saying so is cheaper than being corrected later.
We tested it. It does not hold up, and we are withdrawing it.
The rhetorical pattern is real — the special-education ask is smaller, earlier and harder to oppose than the universal one. But the causal story it implies is contradicted by the legislative history of all four funded provinces, where general funding came first. No primary document states such a strategy, and the broader goal is published openly rather than concealed. We had a version of this page that leaned on that reading. This is the correction.
Does not survive checking.
The report does not mention private schools, independent schools, vouchers or education savings accounts anywhere. Its actual language — that government should "consider alternate approaches to funding, including direct funding to individuals" — is generic, whole-of-government wording. The claim originated in a 2018 opposition news release interpreting that language.
Does not survive checking.
The meeting is real and documented, but its published subject was a flexible child-care agreement. We found nothing indicating school funding was discussed.
Does not survive checking.
It concerns the Protect Ontario Account Investment Fund, an economic-development vehicle with no connection to education funding. The similarity was in headline phrasing only.
Does not survive checking.
The Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association has no documented position on independent-school funding. Catholic boards are publicly governed statutory boards with constitutional protection, not private schools — a different issue entirely.
Partly wrong, corrected here.
The special-education funding paper is dated March 20, 2019, not 2023. The companion report "Toward a More Diverse and Resilient Education Sector" is dated March 2, 2020 and addresses Alberta, not Ontario. We corrected both before publishing.
The open question
Strip away the parts that did not check out, and a real question remains — one that deserves a better answer than either side has given it.
If public money followed a disabled child to a private school, would that child actually be better served? Private schools in Ontario are not bound by the Education Act’s identification and placement process, are not required to write an Individual Education Plan, have no Special Education Advisory Committee, and are not obliged to admit a child whose needs they decide they cannot meet. A funding entitlement that arrives without an admission right is not a placement.
That is the question we intend to keep asking, of anyone proposing this: not what it costs, but what a disabled child would actually be owed at the other end of it — and who they could complain to when it was not delivered.
We are still gathering comparative evidence on how funded independent schools in other jurisdictions serve students with disabilities relative to their public systems. We are not publishing figures we have not verified at source. When we have them, they will appear here.
What your child would actually be entitled to — the parent’s version →
SOURCE
Cardus • 2021-09-15
Authors David Hunt, Anointing Momoh and Deani Van Pelt. Seven models, 21 cost estimates.
SOURCE
Cardus • 2019-03-20
SOURCE
CanLII • 2001
The 2001 tax credit as enacted, and its repeal.
SOURCE
Fraser Institute • 2020-09-08
Author Derek J. Allison. Report text was not retrievable at time of writing; its specific recommendations and costings are deliberately not reproduced.
SOURCE
Cardus • 2022-11-22
Authors David Hunt, Joanna DeJong VanHof and Jenisa Los. Source for the composition of Ontario’s independent-school sector, including the count of schools emphasizing special education as of July 2022.
SOURCE
United Nations Human Rights Committee • 1999-11-05
Views of the Committee on Ontario’s funding of Catholic but not other religious schools. Not binding in Canadian law.
SOURCE
Angus Reid Institute, in partnership with Cardus • 2026-01-30
Written by Spencer Carroll
Founder & Autism Advocate
Evidence on this page
Key claims are paired with their source, evidence tier, and verification date so readers can inspect the public record directly.
$965M
Ontario allocated $965M to the Ontario Autism Program in 2026-27
According to the FAO (2020 report), OAP funding covers less than one-third of estimated need at 2018-19 service levels
89,799
children are registered in the Ontario Autism Program
Under the Ontario Education Act, every student with special needs is entitled to an Individual Education Plan (IEP) and access to an Identification, Placement and Review Committee (IPRC)
1 in 50
According to the 2019 Canadian Health Survey on Children and Youth, about 1 in 50 children and youth aged 1 to 17 in Canada had an autism diagnosis
23%
Only 20,633 children have active funding agreements (23%) — less than one in four