My story
My son has no right to therapy. Ontario put that in writing.
I registered my son for the Ontario Autism Program at eighteen months old. His first appointment came four years, eleven months and eleven days later. Then a lawyer speaking for Ontario put the province’s answer in writing: joining the program gave my son no legal right to therapy or funding. I’m his dad. This is what that means for our family.
Read the record
- The family accountRegistration and the wait are described by Spencer in the original article.
- Ontario’s positionA respondent’s written position must remain attributed as a position.
- The unresolved questionA legal argument is not the same as a final adjudication.
An abstract public institution, document stack and access frame. It is not a courtroom reconstruction or a visual claim about the legal outcome. This visual companion does not determine the legal merits, imply that the case has been decided, or turn Ontario’s disputed position into settled law. The dates and family facts are attributed to the original first-person account. The model contains no real confidential correspondence.
Illustrative model · not evidenceI registered my son for the Ontario Autism Program on September 16, 2021. He was eighteen months old.
Level 3 autism — the most severe classification there is. Adaptive functioning at the 5th percentile. The psychologist’s prescription: intensive intervention, 15 to 25 hours a week.
Ontario registered him. Gave him a client number. Sent us letters.
I registered my son for the Ontario Autism Program at eighteen months old; his first appointment came four years, eleven months and eleven days later. It was a phone call.
My son is six now. Nobody from the province has ever assessed what he needs. No funding has ever been determined. Not one dollar has ever been paid.
When I asked, through my human rights case, how that could be legal, a lawyer for the Government of Ontario answered in writing — on the province’s instructions, speaking for the province, not giving a personal opinion. This is the position Ontario chose to take in my case:
The OAP is a “discretionary program.”
Eligibility “does not give rise to a right to receive services and supports and/or funding.”
Services are “allocated within available resources.”
The Human Rights Code “does not give anyone in Ontario a right to receive publicly funded services or supports.”
In plain language, Ontario’s position is this: registering my son created no legal promise of therapy, funding or support. The province may help when resources allow, but he cannot claim that help as something he is owed. On that view, Ontario could keep him registered for years, assess none of his needs and pay nothing — and break no promise, because no promise existed.
The richest province in Canada built a program for autistic children, took my eighteen-month-old into it and let him turn six inside its queue. Then the lawyer speaking for Ontario said the program never gave him a legal right to receive help.
Taxes are supposed to work like an insurance premium. You pay in — every paycheque, every purchase, every year — and when your child needs care, the care is there. The rest of health care still works this way. Nobody at the emergency room asks whether your child has a right to treatment. The health card is the receipt. Ontario decided autism therapy would work differently.
It collected the premium. It called the payout discretionary.
What we got. What we bought.
In five years, the program offered us two things.
Parent training — one hour, every week or two, for my wife and me. Not for him. His prescription said 15 to 25 hours a week for the child. Ontario delivered an hour a fortnight to his parents, and its own invitation letter admitted what the program really was: his place on the core services waitlist “will be maintained.” Something you do while you wait. We did it. We kept waiting.
Then school-transition invitations — in years he wasn’t starting school. When he did start, he went every weekday morning for six months. Fine program. Not therapy. No funding. No assessment. Not one place forward in the queue.
Everything else, we bought. Weekly speech therapy. Weekly occupational therapy. A private ABA program on top. Year after year of invoices for the exact services the province admits my son never received — at a fraction of the prescribed intensity, because that is what two parents can carry alone.
A family does not pay, year after year, for a service it is already receiving. Remember that sentence the next time Ontario lists everything it “offers.”
I asked. Everyone. For five years.
I wrote to the Ministry’s Autism Branch with one question: when will my son get his needs assessment?
They answered the same day. A list of programs we’d already finished. A budget announcement. No date. No queue position. No timeline. I asked when my son would get help, and the Government of Ontario sent me its press release.
I called AccessOAP — the private agency the province pays to run the front door. A coordinator called back. Her words: “still nothing new in regards to updates to the core clinical services waitlist time.” “Still no information via the ministry.” “In regards to the waitlist, I don’t have any new information.”
The people paid to run the waitlist told me they had no information about the waitlist.
Our MPP wrote to the Minister. The Minister answered over his own signature, and in one sentence confirmed the whole machine:
“AccessOAP is continuing to invite children into core clinical services in the order they registered in the OAP.”
Registration order. That is the entire algorithm. Not severity. Not urgency. Not the psychologist’s report sitting in their file.
And the part that should stop you cold: Ontario does not look at what your child needs until after his turn comes up. The needs assessment happens at the end of the wait — behind a scoring tool families never see. Not the beginning. The end.
Ontario already knows how to run a waitlist. When someone needs a hip replacement, doctors assign priority based on the patient’s condition. When a child has cancer, Ontario’s own system asks how urgently that child needs treatment. With my autistic son, Ontario did the reverse. It put him in line at eighteen months old without asking what he needed. Nearly five years later, it still has not asked.
With cancer, Ontario looks at the child. With surgery, Ontario looks at the damage. With autism, Ontario looks at the calendar.
For autistic children, Ontario chose a different rule: the date a parent filled out a form. The calendar comes first. The child comes later.
The longer they wait, the less autism funding your child gets
This is the part they don’t announce. I found it in their own published funding guidelines. The amount a child receives is locked by age — his age when the needs interview finally happens. Not when you registered. When they got to you.
| Age at determination | Limited | Moderate | Moderate+ | Extensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 3 | $10,900* | — | — | $65,000 |
| 4–9 | $8,900 | $24,500 | $36,800 | $65,000 |
| 10–14 | $7,600 | $18,800 | — | $41,400 |
| 15–17 | $6,600 | $18,300 | — | $31,900 |
*Limited and moderate combined in the youngest band.
Read the last column.
Under Ontario’s Core Clinical Services age bands, a child with extensive needs — the most disabled children in the program — is worth $65,000 a year to Ontario at nine. At ten: $41,400. At fifteen: $31,900. Less than half. Same child. Same disability. The only thing that changed is how long Ontario took to look at him.
My son registered in the youngest band. He aged out of it inside their queue.
The wait is not a delay in the benefit. The wait eats the benefit. Every year they don’t get to your child, they owe your child less — and on their legal position, they never owed him anything to begin with.
A parent behind on child support would look considerably better than the province does at this stage, and that says a lot. When people tell you who they are, believe them.
Fall behind on support in Ontario and the Family Responsibility Office can take it from your wages and suspend your driver’s licence. Fall behind on 71,263 children and there is no office that does that to the province.
I’m one father. Here’s everyone else.
As of the province’s most recent progress reports, 91,974 children are registered in the OAP and 71,263 of them — 77.5% — have no active core funding agreement. When the legislature’s independent watchdog, the Financial Accountability Office, examined the program as of early 2024, it found 70,176 children registered, 19,966 enrolled in core clinical services, and 14,290 actually paid. The list has grown by more than twenty thousand children since. Tens of thousands of families are living some version of the five years I just described. Most of them don’t know about the age-band table. Most of them think the silence means they’re almost at the front.
“The courts settled this” — Auton, Wynberg, and what they didn’t decide
When you push, you hear about two old cases. Auton — the Supreme Court, 2004: the Charter doesn’t force a government to create a health program it hasn’t chosen to fund. Wynberg — Ontario’s Court of Appeal, 2006, same era, same idea.
Fine. Those cases were about whether a province must build a program. Nobody is asking that. Ontario built this one. It wrote the eligibility rules. It signs the invitation letters. It registered my son, and it ran the queue that consumed his early childhood. The question nobody has answered is whether a province that chose to build a service for disabled children can lawfully run it through a mechanism that is blind to need — and that, by design, hits the most severely disabled children hardest.
That’s not a question about creating programs. It’s a question about how a service is administered, and Ontario’s Human Rights Code exists precisely for that question. I’ve put it to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. The tribunal is where I’ll argue it — not here. But no parent should have to file anything to learn what I’ve written on this page. It cost me five years to assemble. It’s yours for free.
Why I am releasing the rest of the record carefully
I am not dumping every recording, name and message onto social media. I preserved the calls, the transcriptions, the written message thread and the time-anchored public records. The record exists. It is being released with legal care to people who can test it: elected representatives, regulators, a court or tribunal, and working journalists under written terms. That is not secrecy. It is how evidence survives.
People in Ontario’s autism community know why that care matters. The Ontario Association for Behaviour Analysis said Lisa MacLeod and her staff warned of “four long years” if the association would not publicly support the government’s autism plan. The same report recorded the minister’s chief of staff dismissing a former Ontario Autism Coalition president as a “professional protester.” That is what was reported when members of this community spoke out. The policy question was turned back onto the people raising it.
Bonnie Crombie is not part of my interaction or my record. She is a separate, public example of how the Ontario PC Party handled a political critic. In recent joint reporting, POLICORNER and The Trillium reported that the party sent someone to Jamaica as opposition research while Crombie was there on a private trip. Ford’s office said he had no knowledge of the matter; Ford later said he did not condone the action and had learned of it the day before, according to The Canadian Press.
These events are separate. I am not alleging that anyone involved in the Crombie story approached me, or that the person in my record acted for Ford, the government or the PC Party. The connection is the lesson: when you challenge power, preserve the evidence before power gets to decide that the story is about you.
Care is not silence. It is how the record survives after power turns its attention to the person carrying it.
What I’d tell you to do — today
- Register the day of diagnosis. Your date is the only lever this system gives you. The table above shows what every year of delay costs.
- Get everything in writing and keep all of it. Every letter, every date, every file number. The province’s own paper is the best evidence of what this program is.
- Email Your MPP. Demand a written answer. It accumulates. It’s a public record.
- Call the Human Rights Legal Support Centre — 1-866-625-5179. Free legal advice. The HRTO hears complaints about how services are administered, and filing costs nothing.
- Complain to the Ontario Ombudsman. Program administration is exactly their job.
- Join the Ontario Autism Coalition. Alone, you’re a client number in a queue that can’t see you. Together, you’re a political problem they can’t allocate away.
What other parents ask me
- Does my child have a right to autism therapy in Ontario?
- A lawyer for the Government of Ontario, following the province's instructions, wrote that OAP eligibility "does not give rise to a right to receive services and supports and/or funding" and that services are "allocated within available resources." In plain language, Ontario says registration does not legally promise a child therapy or funding. The province may provide help when resources are available, but it says an eligible or registered child cannot claim that help as something they are legally owed.
- How long does a family actually wait for the Ontario Autism Program?
- As of May 13, 2026, 91,974 children were registered in the Ontario Autism Program and 71,263 of them — 77.5% — had no active core funding agreement, per MCCSS Ontario Autism Program figures, May 13, 2026, obtained by the Ontario Autism Coalition under Freedom of Information. The Ontario Autism Coalition reports, from community intake, that invitations are currently reaching families who registered in August 2021 — at minimum a 5-year wait for any child registering today.
- Why does OAP funding decrease with age?
- Ontario's Core Clinical Services funding runs from $6,600 to $65,000 a year, but the amount is set by a child's age at their Determination of Needs interview — not by when they registered or how severe their needs are. For a child with the most extensive needs, the province's own published bands show the ceiling fall from $65,000 a year up to age 9, to $41,400 at 10–14, to $31,900 at 15–17: less than half, for the same child, the same disability. Because invitations go out strictly in registration order, every year Ontario takes to reach a child's needs interview is a year of eligible funding the age bands quietly take back.
- What happens after OAP registration?
- After registration, a child is placed in a queue and invited to service strictly "in the order they registered" — not by severity, urgency, or any assessment already on file, per the Ministry's own written confirmation. While waiting, families may be offered parent training or school-transition sessions, but no funding, therapy hours, or needs assessment happen until the child's turn comes up. Ontario only evaluates what a child actually needs — the Determination of Needs interview that sets the funding band — at the end of the wait, which is one reason 3,706 children are already "enrolled" in Core Clinical Services with no funding agreement yet in place.
- How does Ontario decide which child gets funding first?
- Ontario invites children to core clinical services strictly "in the order they registered" for the program — not by severity, urgency, or clinical need, according to the Minister's own written confirmation. A child's Determination of Needs interview, the assessment that actually evaluates what they need, does not happen until their registration date comes up in the queue, so severity plays no role in who is served next. The only variable a family can control is how early they register, since registration date is the entire mechanism.
- Does registering early guarantee my child will get autism funding sooner?
- Registering early is the only lever a family has, but it is not a guarantee: invitations move in registration order, so a family's place depends on how many children registered before them, not on urgency. It matters doubly because of Ontario's age-based funding bands — a child invited at age 9 can qualify for up to $65,000 a year, while the same child with the same needs invited at 15 qualifies for as little as $31,900, so being assessed earlier can also mean a larger funding band. Once entered, a registration date is fixed for the life of the wait; families cannot change their position afterward.
I did everything right. Early diagnosis, immediate registration, every program they offered, every channel they provide, five years of letters and calls — and I paid privately for the therapy the whole time, because my son’s childhood couldn’t wait for their queue.
The answer Ontario instructed its lawyer to give, in writing, is that joining the program gave my son no legal right to receive therapy or funding.
The province is counting on parents being too exhausted to read the fine print. I read it. Now so have you.
Spencer Carroll is dad to a six-year-old boy with Level 3 autism. He runs End The Wait Ontario.
Quotations and figures on this page come from the public record and the author’s own correspondence: Ontario’s legal position on the OAP, presented by a lawyer for the Government of Ontario; the Financial Accountability Office report FA2305-MCCSS (pp. 23–24); the OAP guidelines for core clinical services and supports (ontario.ca, updated 10 March 2026); ministry progress reports obtained through freedom of information; and ministerial correspondence of 10 September 2024. A human rights application concerning these events is before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Ontario’s published surgical wait-time guidance supports the comparison between its needs-based surgery priorities and the OAP’s registration-order queue. The merits of the application will be argued at the tribunal, not here. Reporting about the public treatment of critics comes from The Canadian Press, as carried by Global News and CityNews, and the joint investigation by POLICORNER and The Trillium. This article is the author’s account and commentary, not legal advice.