240,000 Volunteers: What a Private Citizen Told Me While My Son Waited Nearly Five Years for Autism Funding
I had reached the Premier and his Minister. I still could not find out when my son would get help. Someone else offered to explain how power worked, and where I fitted into it.
By Spencer Carroll66 audio clips
The sequence
Government: Premier Doug Ford calls. About 13 minutes. He promises to have his minister call.
Government: Minister Michael Parsa calls. About 10 minutes. No funding date.
Coutinho: Coutinho writes to me. I reply and start a text thread.
Me: First call. Just over an hour.
Me: Second call. He describes “the game”: 240,000 volunteers. Just over 1 hour 41 minutes.
Coutinho: Third call. He offers to text the Finance Minister. 44 minutes.
Me: I ask the Finance Minister’s offices for a meeting myself.
Me: I decline his offer in writing. 5:36 p.m., after both emails.
The fast track
The short version, with the key recordings. The full account follows: every quotation, the records I checked and what cuts the other way.
- I'm Spencer Carroll. My autistic son can't speak. He waited nearly five years for funding from the Ontario Autism Program, which pays for autistic children's therapy.
- In January 2026 the Premier and the programme's minister both called me. The minister said intake had been placed independent from government, so he personally didn't know where my son stood. A ministry liaison said they couldn't find out.
- The day after the minister called, a private citizen, Rouhan Coutinho, wrote to me, saying he'd spent about thirty years in the autism-programme field. We spoke three times, in January and March. I recorded every call.
On our first call he raised the governing party's convention and its president:
Rouhan Coutinho
the PC party president, who's the host is Michael. He's one of my best friends and it's a family affair. So if this is a open offer, um, I don't know you from Adam, but it's a family affair, so meaning like anyone's welcome.
The party's president is Michael Diamond. I found no independent record of that friendship.
On our second call he described what he said he'd put to parents of autistic children a year earlier. By "Doug" he meant, as I understood it, the Premier:
Rouhan Coutinho
You have 80,000, you know, kids. Translate that into, I don't know, one or two parents and one or two grandparents. Let's say it's a three-to-one ratio. That's 240,000 adults. If Doug takes care of your kids, can you deliver 240,000 adults as volunteers in the next election? Because if you can, you're in the game.
In the same passage he said he wasn't saying he agreed with the game. I don't know which parents he spoke to, and I have no evidence the Premier or anyone in his government knew of or endorsed it. Later that call he said people find autistic people off-putting because they "lack cognitive empathy", and applied that to the Ontario Autism Coalition's executive. I reject that completely.
On our third call, in March, he offered to text the Finance Minister for me:
Rouhan Coutinho
...which I'm happy to today, right now, or when we hang up, to Peter, encouraging him to sit down with you
In the same breath: "I'm not saying that'll be worth anything." When I called him a power broker, he said:
Rouhan Coutinho
No, no, no, no, no. I'm not a power broker. I'm a person who applies pressure using power when I deem it to be appropriate. There's a difference. I'm nobody's friend.
I turned his offer down in writing and asked the minister's offices for a meeting myself. He never asked me for money. Nothing shows that anyone in government sent him or knew he had called.
Why it matters: the minister couldn't tell me where my son stood, and the person offering me a route to a minister was a private individual. Families should get that answer from the programme itself.
The full account starts here.
Three voices
My son can't speak. Since September 2021 he has been registered with the Ontario Autism Program (the OAP), which funds therapy for autistic children. In January 2026, more than four years on, I still didn't know where he stood in the funding queue.
On 25 January Premier Doug Ford called. He said his minister knew the file better than he did and promised that Michael Parsa, the minister responsible, would call.
Parsa called the next afternoon. He explained that he personally couldn't tell me where my son stood because of how intake, the step where families register and wait, had been set up:
Minister Michael Parsa
the recommendation of the community that proposed the program was for [...] the intake process [...] independent from government so I personally don't even know who's where
The ellipses mark a false start and one small word, which the clip plays.
I don't suggest he was holding anything back. As he explained it, intake had been put at arm's length from his ministry; as I saw it, that worked both ways. Intake is run by AccessOAP, an organisation under contract with the ministry. I don't know what the ministry could have obtained from AccessOAP had it asked. I know what I was told when I asked.
The next day, 27 January, Rouhan Coutinho, a private citizen I'd never met, wrote to me. Nothing I've found connects the timing to my calls with the Premier or the minister. I replied and called him at 3:14 p.m. Pressed about my son's place in the queue, he gave his guess, then said:
Rouhan Coutinho
This is my guess. I do not know. I know lots of things. I can get lots of secrets. I can even find this one out if I care. I don't.
He said he didn't know either. I never tested whether he could find out. I have no evidence he could obtain my son's record or any confidential information, that he knew of my calls with Ford or Parsa before I told him, or that either of them knew he'd contact me.
At 11:47 the next morning, 28 January, a ministry liaison called with Parsa's promised follow-up. I asked where my son stood. The liaison said:
Ministry liaison
we are not able to actually find out where the person is on the wait list
I've quoted only the start of the liaison's sentence. The ministry also offered a consent form, a search for support I might be missing, and a promise to look for programs I could apply to.
Coutinho and I spoke again that afternoon, for about an hour and forty minutes, and a third time on 19 March. The transcripts of the six recordings behind this article (my three calls with him and those with the Premier, the minister and the liaison) contain no threat, no demand for money and no offer to move my son ahead of another child.
What follows is what a man who told me he wasn't in government said, in his own words: that the governing party's president was one of his best friends, that he applies pressure using power when he deems it appropriate, that he could put in a word with a cabinet minister, and that parents who could deliver 240,000 volunteers in the next election would be "in the game." That figure was his own illustrative arithmetic, not a count anyone had promised. Public records touch on some of his career, though not the roles he described; I found none for his political relationships. I name him because this account examines those claims and an offer he made me. Naming him doesn't by itself establish that he represented anyone.
This is a story about what fills the space when a province hands a public programme's front door to a contractor and steps back. I didn't understand that when the message arrived. By the third call, I did.
Why I am publishing this
My son now has his funding. It arrived in mid-September 2026, almost five years after I registered him. I'm not writing to get him seen sooner.
Who I am: a Bachelor of Commerce, eighteen years running my own businesses, and before that a management career in hotels in Canada, the United States and Scotland. I built End The Wait Ontario, an independent public dataset on this programme that draws upwards of thirty thousand visitors a month; a World Health Organization social-media feature included a clip of me discussing it. I read the financial records myself. I didn't need rescuing. Yet none of that, not even a platform with that reach, got me an answer to one question: when would a public programme help my child? I don't know why he wrote to me; he never said.
I'm on these recordings too. Here's what I was saying.
I told him why I started: "my breaking point was my son getting diagnosed and none of this stuff being available."
On 19 March I told him what was wrong with the arrangement my son was waiting in: "You have a private administrator administering a program that cannot let people know when they will receive funding in a timely fashion."
He told me to ask more nicely. Talking to him as if he were part of government, I told him what I was asking of the province. "Clear the wait list. Full stop. You've got the funds for it."
"You don't make kids wait five years, like, full stop."
"Pay the bill. Full stop, man. You take my tax dollars. You put it to where it's required. Pretty simple arrangement."
Told the system is just like this, I said: "Saying I suck at stuff because I just suck at stuff is not an excuse."
"what you accept versus not is pretty much the driver of what gets done."
I didn't have a minister's phone number. I had a website people read. Early in the third call I told him what it was for: "sunlight disinfects and that's what it should be."
Near the end I put it more bluntly. By eyeballs I meant views of the site: "I've got eyeballs and a lot of them."
He understood me. "Your point is that eyeballs equal pressure."
It was.
No parent should need anyone's connections to find out where their child stands. That's why I'm publishing this.
Who he told me he was
His written approach on 27 January described roughly thirty years in the autism-programme field. He wrote:
Rouhan Coutinho
I completed four of the last six reviews and transformation strategies of the Ontario autism "ecosystem" for four of the last six Ontario administrations so if you want to pick my brain as to how inept I am feel free
He told me about a role in what he called "his original campaign", meaning, as I understood it, Doug Ford's:
Rouhan Coutinho
I think for like a New York minute I was vice chair of his original campaign
He kept his own qualifiers: "I think," "for like a New York minute," "original." I found no record confirming that role: the officer lists I could find for Ford's 2018 leadership and general-election campaigns don't name him. A missing record is not proof a claim is false, and an unpaid, informal role can leave no public trace.
His first text, that afternoon, before we'd spoken, raised a party convention: "Are you going to the convention?" When I asked which one, he wrote:
Rouhan Coutinho
No. The biannual policy convention of the party in power in Ontario. Which is currently the PCs. But the liberals also used to do it.
On the call he said that if I planned to go, he was happy to put in a call. Then:
Rouhan Coutinho
the PC party president, who's the host is Michael. He's one of my best friends and it's a family affair. So if this is a open offer, um, I don't know you from Adam, but it's a family affair, so meaning like anyone's welcome.
The president of the governing Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario is Michael Diamond, founding principal of a government-relations firm and Doug Ford's 2018 leadership campaign manager. Those facts are public record. The friendship is his claim alone: none of those facts verifies it, and a private friendship, like an informal role, need not leave a public record. I am not suggesting Mr. Diamond knew of or had anything to do with Coutinho's approach to me, and nothing I found links him to the campaign role Coutinho described.
What he said about power
Later in the first call, on which meetings are worth having, he said:
Rouhan Coutinho
if you want to play in this space, the only meetings that matter, I mean this, the only meetings that matter are whoever's in government
Earlier, telling me about redesigning the programme my son was waiting in, he said of how he talks:
Rouhan Coutinho
Everyone's like, Rohan, you can't talk like this. I can do whatever the fuck I want.
He went on:
Rouhan Coutinho
So when I redesigned this system, that's why I took government out of it.
Near the start of that call he had called himself "a technocrat, I'm a libertarian, I don't believe in government at all."
On his role in the autism programme, he corrected himself in the same breath: "I made the decision," then, "I made the recommendation." A few minutes later he drew a clearer line himself: "politicians could make recommendations," and "bureaucrats, the deputy minister on down, they decided on implementation." (The clip plays the sentence between the two phrases.)
That correction applies to every claim he made about designing the programme. I found no independent record that he redesigned the system, and I have no document establishing any role for him in designing, procuring or administering the current intake arrangement.
The game
He used "the game" for how, in his account, politicians respond to organised supporters. On our first call he had told me that "squeaky wheels in theory get grease but actually voters get responses".
On our second call, the next afternoon, he floated pooling several billion dollars from other provincial budgets, including what he called "the one billion from, you know, the OAP," for the children in the programme, whom he put at 80,000. Getting there, he said, would take politics from the top down:
Rouhan Coutinho
No, this is where you need politicians who are elected by the people to lead, to say, yeah, I heard you. We're still doing this. That's no more discussion. This is what we're doing. And I'll, and I'll eat it at the polls.
Then he described what supporters of a change must make known to the politician in return, something he said he teaches:
Rouhan Coutinho
my point, Spencer, was whenever I teach people how to do this, I'm like, in the end, you kind of, you can't, you don't say it, but it has to be known that it's like, if you do these changes, whoever this is, like, whatever they are, we will have your back.
His example was the teachers' unions, which in his account went to the Liberal premier of the day, twenty years ago, and said:
Rouhan Coutinho
you take care of us, we'll take care of you. And what that means is that every four years or five years when there's a provincial election, the teachers come out for the liberals hard.
When I called that a big vote, he corrected me: it was the volunteers, staffing phones, canvassing and driving voters to the polls. Then he told me what he said he'd put to parents of autistic children in the programme a year earlier. By "Doug" he meant, as I understood it, Premier Doug Ford. The ellipsis marks one short sentence I've left out.
Rouhan Coutinho
And so when I was talking to the parents about this a year ago, I was like, guys, Doug will give you more money, will you be there for him? And they're like, well, we don't want to. [...] Like, I've taught you how to play the game. I'm not saying I agree with the game, but I also, I'm not sure I agree with your goals. But if this is the game and you want to play it, this is the game. You have 80,000, you know, kids. Translate that into, I don't know, one or two parents and one or two grandparents. Let's say it's a three-to-one ratio. That's 240,000 adults. If Doug takes care of your kids, can you deliver 240,000 adults as volunteers in the next election? Because if you can, you're in the game.
He said he wasn't saying he agreed with the game. What he described is a trade: if the Premier takes care of autistic children, their families deliver election volunteers. That's his account of a political tactic, not evidence that any official or group of parents agreed to it.
I don't know which parents he spoke to, and I couldn't confirm that conversation. The 240,000 figure is his own arithmetic; the ministry's count, as of 13 May 2026, was 91,974 children registered. I have no evidence that the Premier, or anyone in his government, knew of or endorsed what he says he told those parents.
What he said about autistic people, and about the Ontario Autism Coalition
About eight minutes after the 240,000 passage, he asked me:
Rouhan Coutinho
This is not meant to be condescending at all. It's just a genuine data question or knowledge question. Have you read about autism? Like a lot?
I said I had, a fair bit. He went on:
Rouhan Coutinho
are you familiar with why people find people on the spectrum disconcerting
I answered: "because they cut right to the point." He said:
Rouhan Coutinho
No, because they lack cognitive empathy.
He then described kinds of empathy, using my son as one example; by cognitive empathy he meant putting yourself in someone else's shoes. He came back to his point:
Rouhan Coutinho
The reason why people find people with autism so off-putting and the reason they avoid them and they don't like them, to be honest, is because they lack cognitive empathy. People think that autistic people don't have empathy and they have a ton of emotional empathy. And they have a ton of emotional empathy for themselves.
About a minute later he applied it to the Ontario Autism Coalition (the OAC), a volunteer group of parents and advocates:
Rouhan Coutinho
The challenge for the OAC is that because most of them are themselves [on] the spectrum, they're like, I want everything right now. And it's like, okay, people are working hard for you. [...] They gave you a 12-hour day. Well, tomorrow's another day. They're tired. Well, that's not good enough. Okay, well, now they just don't want to fucking talk to you.
The ellipsis marks one sentence I've left out, which the clip plays.
Then he told me I had the empathy he said they lacked: "You come across as having some of that because you've run a business."
Rouhan Coutinho
And so I think it's great if you want to jump in the mix because there's no willing parent on the other side who has, not has cognitive empathy, but the OAC executive, I love them to pieces, they don't have it.
He said this to the father of an autistic child who can't speak.
I don't know whether anyone at the Ontario Autism Coalition is autistic, and I can't verify what he said. It isn't my business, and it wasn't his to announce. Nobody should draw any conclusion about anyone's health from his words. I print it because it's his reasoning, not because I accept any of it.
My reading, and only mine: I took it as an invitation. As I heard it, the parents' own advocates were the problem, and I could be the alternative. He didn't say the coalition should be replaced or ask me to act against it.
The coalition and the advocates around it are volunteers and parents who have carried this work for years while raising their own children.
I reject the reasoning completely and don't adopt as fact anything he said about the coalition or its executive. Nothing about being autistic makes a person off-putting, or less able to speak for themselves or anyone else. Wanting everything right now, for children who have waited five years, isn't a symptom. Parents asking for care after years of waiting don't need a lesson in patience.
Here's what I think that argument does, whatever he meant by it; this part is opinion. If parents who object can be written off as people who can't see the other side, nobody has to answer their objection. I can't say whether anyone has used the argument that way. Their objection is to a structure and a bill: a private contractor between families and care that, I think, costs more to run than it should. In my opinion, an argument like that shifts the subject from the contractor to the character of the people complaining. He didn't mention the contractor in what I've quoted, and I can't know his purpose.
I've seen nothing to suggest the Premier, or anyone in his government, knew of or endorsed any of this.
The March offer, and my refusal
On 19 March he texted again, and we spoke that evening for forty-four minutes. Early on, talking to him as if he were part of government, I told him its staff were reading my site closely:
Spencer Carroll (me)
and based on the interaction with the site, you guys are looking at it like a fine-tooth comb
When he asked who I meant by "you guys," I said: "Government." He corrected me: "I'm not in government."
I told him I had already "tried the subtle nuance of asking" for a meeting.
He suggested I speak to someone he called Peter, who controls the budget:
Rouhan Coutinho
But if the win is you want money, go talk to Peter who controls the money. That would be my suggestion.
I understood him to mean Peter Bethlenfalvy, the Finance Minister. A few minutes later he described him as "the treasurer is a guy named Peter, he's actually a good friend of mine," and offered to write to him. I haven't verified that friendship.
I told him the site was outranking most government pages on the terms that mattered, and that "narrative is set." He asked: "What you want is a meeting where you ask for money, right?" I gave him Oliver Twist: "Sure, but to what point? Like, just keeping coming back saying, please, sir, can I have some more?" "Versus what?" he said. A minute later I told him what I thought the province should do: pay the bill.
He then offered to send Peter a text:
Rouhan Coutinho
...which I'm happy to today, right now, or when we hang up, to Peter, encouraging him to sit down with you
and, in the same breath: "I'm not saying that'll be worth anything."
I have no evidence that Bethlenfalvy knew about this offer, received a text, or agreed to meet. Nothing in this account is evidence that access was purchased.
Seconds later, he set out the other route:
Rouhan Coutinho
if in the end you want the conversation with him about what's reality or, like, what he can do or not, I'm happy to help. But if you want to build, you know, a huge support, you know, a wave of support, and you want to use that as a cudgel, do that too. I've done it.
Later I told him:
Spencer Carroll (me)
Here I am applying pressure and it's working.
After criticising government spending, I put it to him directly:
Spencer Carroll (me)
You're the supposed power broker here that exists.
He denied it three times in under a minute. First:
Rouhan Coutinho
No, no, no, no, no. I'm not a power broker. I'm a person who applies pressure using power when I deem it to be appropriate. There's a difference. I'm nobody's friend.
He went on:
Rouhan Coutinho
When you ask members of cabinet what they think of Rohan, like, I hate that guy. They should. I'm not a power broker. I was trying to help you
His sentence runs on into a private matter, so I've stopped the quotation there. That's his own account of his reputation; no minister said it to me.
About fifteen seconds later he said it a third time, describing himself in nearly the same terms: "I'm no power broker. I'm a guy who applies power to things when I want to see something that I want done…"
His answer describes discretion: he decides when to use whatever power he has. I couldn't park my child's need until a better moment. The stakes weren't equal, even if every offer was sincere.
My business builds closets. He had drawn the line between us a couple of minutes earlier: "You make closets. Do you pursue government contracts making closets? Of course you don't." And later, on how the world is run: "I'm in a different place than you are, right?" I was: in the place where the queue is.
A few minutes later he said:
Rouhan Coutinho
you're new to the public policy circle but this is reality right
I can't tell from a transcript whether he meant that warmly.
In January he said the party president, "Michael," was "one of my best friends." On 19 March, in the same call in which he described Peter as "a good friend of mine," he also said "I'm nobody's friend." I can't tell what he meant by "friend" in any of these, and I draw no conclusion from them about anyone's friendships.
Later, speaking of the Finance Minister, he added his own limit on the offer:
Rouhan Coutinho
I just think he's got 3,000 other priorities, right?
That's his caution, not anything the minister's office told me.
The next afternoon, 20 March, I emailed the Finance Minister's constituency office and the ministry's general address myself, asking for thirty minutes on the waitlist. An automatic reply came within half a minute. My mailbox shows no substantive reply since, though that search doesn't cover every channel.
I was offered a private route, meaning an introduction from someone who says he knows the minister; I used the public one and got no answer. I can't know whether the private route would have worked, and I'm not saying it would have been improper. I'd rather be told no through the front door than get an answer through a personal introduction. I didn't have to decide whether any of his claims were true to say no.
Later that day, at 5:36 p.m., I wrote to Coutinho: "Appreciate the call and the offer yesterday. Going to keep doing what I'm doing. All the best." That was my refusal, written and dated. He texted twice more, on 21 and 27 March; I didn't reply.
Earlier, on 3 February, he had texted: "Hey what's the name of your company?" Then: "My friends and family and businesses are constantly doing construction," and "Happy to know your business." I answered. The next day I told him in writing that I needed to keep business separate from policy, though I was happy to keep talking policy. Those texts didn't offer me work, he never offered me a contract, and he never asked for anything in return for his help.
The record at a glance
Each finding sits beside what it does not establish.
Flu-shot program, 2004
Shows A Rouhan Coutinho is listed among forty members of the ministry team that received an award that year.
Does not show What role he had on that programme.
Premier’s Office backgrounder, 21 April 2004
Campaign and program-design claims
Shows No public record found confirming the vice-chair role or a design role.
Does not show That his account is false. Unpaid advice may not be credited.
Searches of public records
What the records support
A 2004 Premier's Office backgrounder lists a Rouhan Coutinho among forty members of the Ministry of Health's First Universal Influenza Vaccination Program Team, which received an award that year. That documents team membership, not his role on it.
The Ministry of Health's Public Accounts, the province's annual payment record, list payments of $928,408 in 2008 to 2009 and $101,208 in 2009 to 2010 to nD-Insight, a corporation connected to his professional profile. I don't know what the payments were for or what his role in that corporation was. They predate the current government by roughly a decade, and I found no record tying them to any autism assignment; I include them only as evidence of past public-sector work. An archived version of the firm's website, dated 2008 to 2013, describes provincial public-sector health work and lists "Government Sales" among its services, by its own account, not an independent finding.
So far as I can find, no one but Coutinho himself has publicly connected him to Michael Diamond. A private friendship need not leave a public record.
| What he said, on tape | Status | What an independent record shows |
|---|---|---|
| "I think for like a New York minute I was vice chair of his original campaign." | CLAIM, unverified | I found no independent record confirming his qualified claim of a brief campaign role. A missing record does not show the claim is false. |
| "So when I redesigned this system, that's why I took government out of it." (first call, 38 minutes in) | CLAIM, unverified | The 2004 record concerns an influenza vaccination team. It neither confirms nor disproves his account of work on the autism programme. I found no document establishing his role in the current intake arrangement. |
| "the PC party president, who's the host is Michael. He's one of my best friends." | CLAIM, unverified | Michael Diamond is the PC Party president. I found no independent record establishing that he and Coutinho know each other. |
| "the treasurer is a guy named Peter, he's actually a good friend of mine" | CLAIM, unverified | I found no independent record of the friendship. |
| "I'm not a power broker... I'm nobody's friend" (he said "I'm not a power broker" or "I'm no power broker" three times; "I'm nobody's friend" once) | His own words | Sits beside "he's one of my best friends," spoken by him in the first call. |
| "I'm not in government." | His own words | I found no provincial appointment under his name, and he does not appear on the Sunshine list, the province's public salary disclosure. |
| Any claim that government, Ford, Diamond or a minister sent him, briefed him, or knew of his approach | Searched for directly | Not found, in the recordings behind this article or the full written record. |
What cuts the other way
I went back through all six recordings looking for a threat, a demand for payment, an offer to move my son ahead of another child, or an instruction to hand over control of my site. I found none. He never asked me for money, a donation or a fee of any kind, at any point in the two months between his first message and his last. He didn't insist I use him. When I said I'd already tried the ministry, he suggested I write directly to the minister to request a thirty-minute meeting.
I had already done exactly that, more than once.
Near the end of the call I told him what I wanted:
Spencer Carroll (me)
At the very minimum, pony up the money where it should go.
He answered, "I genuinely hope for you that you get that point across and people change." On our first call he had said "if there's anything I could ever do, let me know," and, of politicians generally, "most of them also want to do good."
And for all the access he described, he also said:
Rouhan Coutinho
...I never won that battle.
None of this tells me whether his connection claims are true.
Right of reply
Everyone named here can reply, and I'll publish what they send.
I didn't ask Mr. Coutinho, Mr. Diamond, the Finance Minister's office or the Premier's Office for comment before publishing.
Any substantive reply will go here in full, with the date it arrived, edited only to protect other people's private information. I'll check it against the recordings and the records. If a reply shows I got something wrong, I'll correct it here, date the correction and say what changed.
Anyone else named or described here, including any organisation, can reply the same way through the site's contact page.
Why this matters
My son was waiting for something the federal government treats as health: Ottawa's national autism framework belongs to its Minister of Health and was developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada. On our first call I told Coutinho what I expect from a province: "pick up my garbage, fill the potholes, give me health care." And why I count my son's care as health care: "The feds recognize it as health care."
Ontario runs it differently. Intake was handed to AccessOAP, under contract with the ministry. The minister told me intake had been made "independent from government," and that he personally didn't know where my child stood. The province plans to spend $965 million on the programme this year. By the ministry's own figures, as of 13 May 2026, 91,974 children were registered and 20,711 had an active core funding agreement, which pays for core therapy.
On 25 January I raised with the Premier what I saw in the auditor reports, and asked why the programme couldn't run through OHIP, Ontario's public health insurance plan:
Spencer Carroll (me)
there seems to be, going through all the various auditor reports and everything, there seems to be a massive private overhead in administering all of these services. And to me, it's really weird that it couldn't be delivered directly through OHIP. That, to me, is the head-scratcher.
A little later I said that if privatized health care worked, it wasn't showing up in the wait times. The Premier said:
Premier Doug Ford
Never ever be private healthcare under my watch. Never.
The Ontario Autism Program isn't hospital care, and I'm not saying he misled me. He was speaking about private health care as he understood it, and I have no evidence he had the intake contract in mind. But its intake is run by a private contractor, and families buy therapy from private providers.
Into that gap came the man in these recordings. Neither a public servant nor an elected official, he told me the party president was one of his best friends and offered to text a minister before we'd hung up. I was not talking to my government. I was talking to a private individual standing in the space where my government used to be.
As I see it, that's what a privatised public programme looks like from the inside. When a government places its own system at arm's length, as I found it, nobody has an answer: not the minister, not the ministry. As far as I can tell, the arrangement leaves the government no easy way to find out, and the protections of a public office (a register, a record, an office you can write to) didn't get me an answer either. My complaint is that the oversight that exists didn't produce one. I'm not saying the ministry has no authority over the intake organisation.
According to a ministry breakdown The Trillium obtained under freedom of information, running the intake organisation cost an estimated $57.9 million in 2023-24, out of about $691 million the programme spent. The tool that decides how much funding a child gets hasn't been made public: the ministry refused to disclose it, and in 2024 the Information and Privacy Commissioner upheld that refusal. A parent can't see where his child stands in the queue, or how his child's needs will be scored.
The $57.9 million is about eight cents of every dollar the programme spent. It's operating cost, not profit, and I can't use it to separate intake from the organisation's other work, which is why I want the scope and cost explained. Ontario already has a health administration: as I understand it, OHIP pays for care without a contractor standing between patient and doctor. In my view, this arrangement builds a second administration beside it. To me it looks like private insurance in the United States: a company between family and care, paid to process the claim. The comparison is about the extra layer of administration only, not the intake organisation's conduct or finances. That's my opinion, and it's what I was asking the Premier when I said I couldn't see why this wasn't delivered through OHIP. It's an argument about the programme's design and cost; my calls with Coutinho don't prove who designed it.
A public programme has left parents with too little information and too much reason to wonder whether knowing someone would help. I've found nothing showing that knowing someone changes a child's place in the queue or funding. I know what it did to me: it kept me asking strangers about a system my government pays for.
None of what he told me needed my agreement. I was exhausted, and I had no way to check most of it while he was talking.
What I make of these calls is opinion. Access to this government, real or claimed, seemed to run as much through people who say they know the people in charge as through any office door.
I spent my twenties in hotels where money and power actually stay, the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton, close enough to real authority to learn how it carries itself. In my experience, it doesn't tell you the party president is one of its best friends, or do arithmetic about your community at you. The man on my phone did both. That's an impression from my working life, not evidence about him.
So here is what I make of it, as opinion. To me it felt less like advice than an audition, with a route to other parents as the part on offer. I may be wrong about that: he told me he was trying to help, and I can't know his purpose. My impression rests on what he said about the coalition's executive and his arithmetic about volunteers. He never asked me to campaign for a party, deliver volunteers or change what my site says. I may be wrong about what was intended; a recording can't capture intention. What he said is on the recordings, and below I explain how I checked each quotation.
The bigger picture is opinion too. I think a programme ends up like this when the people who shape it answer to relationships instead of the public. He told me he redesigned the system and took government out of it, that the only meetings that matter are with whoever is in government, and that he'd put a trade to parents: if the Premier takes care of their kids, they deliver volunteers. I can't prove he did any of it; I can prove that's how he says it works. I haven't identified who designed the intake arrangement or shown that any decision-maker acted for a personal contact, and I can't connect the length of my son's wait to him or anyone he named. If he's right, that says a lot about how a programme like this gets shaped. If he's wrong, a man with no official role I could find was still the only person who offered me a route to a minister.
I have no evidence that Ford, Diamond, Bethlenfalvy or anyone in government sent Coutinho to me, authorised him to speak or act for them, or even knew he was there or had called. The tapes prove what Coutinho said about himself, not whether it's true, and they don't prove that anyone in government used him as an instrument of anything.
Parents shouldn't need a personal introduction, real or claimed, to find out where their own child stands. Publish the wait times and the rules behind them, not children's identities. Let the Auditor General see the intake contract. Give each family a straight answer, or name who is responsible for finding out.
To other parents in this queue: ask in writing, and keep the answer. Don't take the back door. An unanswered question belongs in the record too. Vote. And if a friendly voice calls to explain how things really work, press record.
My son cannot speak. I can. I recorded the conversations, checked what I could, and put my refusal in writing.
One thing you can do today. Ask your MPP, in writing, to have the province publish the Ontario Autism Program's wait times and the rules behind them.
Asking in writing: a template. Send this to AccessOAP, the Ontario Autism Program's intake organisation, and copy your MPP:
Keep a copy, and note the date you sent it.
The record and disclosures
I hold recordings of every call described here, plus his written approach, our text thread, my written refusals and the public-record captures cited above. Section 184(2)(a) of Canada's Criminal Code lets a participant record a call without the other party's knowledge. I took part in every call I recorded, and nobody else on them was told. That exception governs the recording; it doesn't by itself resolve every question about publishing what was said.
Spoken quotations follow a machine transcription, checked against at least one other, and each clip was checked again on its own. Square brackets inside a quotation mark a word I've supplied, and [...] marks words I've left out.
On the audio. Almost every quoted recording passage has a short play button beside it; a few short phrases overlapping a longer clip don't. Each clip is one continuous cut from the original recording, with nothing added, removed or reordered and no change to speed. The only processing is a split-second fade at each end, to avoid a click, and one volume setting per whole clip, so quiet and loud calls play at similar levels. Nothing inside a clip is compressed, filtered or cleaned up. The original, unadjusted recordings are preserved. I listened to each published excerpt against the original recording. The Premier's and the minister's clips let readers hear both men in their own voices; I think they're fair to them. The ministry liaison is a public servant answering a phone line, so that quotation is text only.
What I wrote before. I first wrote about these calls here on 7 September 2026, without naming him; readers of that piece will recognise this one. I've replaced it with a correction note and preserved the original. In September I also said I wouldn't identify him or publish recordings. That no longer describes my decision. I stand by what the recordings show, but not all my wording: going back through them for this account, I concluded that some of my September wording went further than I can establish. I described his purpose in terms the recordings don't establish, and I withdraw those descriptions. I also left out qualifications he made himself, including corrections to his own claims; this account puts them back. He said he was trying to help me. Where the two accounts differ, this is the one I stand behind.
I have a Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario application against the province about this programme; this account is separate from it. I run the site that publishes it and have a direct family interest in the programme's funding. That's why every quotation is sourced and timestamped, every gap disclosed, and every named person can reply.
To dispute a quotation, identify it through the site's contact page and I'll check it against the recording. Substantive corrections will be dated and explained.
This is one father's account, prepared without a lawyer's review at this stage. It isn't legal advice or a finding by any court or tribunal.