The province has been reaching out to families, says the minister of children, community, and social services
Families have a hard time getting consistent, reliable, and clear information about services, according to the Ontario Autism Coalition, and it doesn’t help that the minister in charge has “ghosted” them.
Since the summer, the provincial government has been trying to get children with autism into a new program. It failed to reach its goal of giving money to 8,000 families by the end of the year, but it won’t say by how much.
The Autism Coalition says that families don’t know about the program and that the government needs to do a better job of telling them how to get “scarce services” and how many kids are getting them.
Kate Logue, the vice president of community outreach for the coalition, says that it would help if Merrilee Fullerton, the minister of children, community, and social services, met with them and held a press conference to talk about how the program would be rolled out.
In response to the NDP during question period, Fullerton said that her ministry has been reaching out to families through emails, phone calls, and letters to get them to sign up for what she calls a “world-leading program.”
Logue says that government officials have asked the coalition why there aren’t more families in the program. She says that it’s because the ministry isn’t communicating well with the families, not because the families aren’t interested in the program.