ABA in Ontario

ABA/IBI in Ontario: Missed Opportunities

• Families of children with autism must wait two to four years, or longer, to access provincially funded IBI in Ontario.
• 1,650 children with autism are currently waiting to receive provincially funded IBI—that’s more than the 1,262 children currently receiving it. Another 361 children are waiting just to qualify to get on the IBI waitlist.
• During this lengthy wait, many families try to pursue private IBI to maximize their children’s early years. However, since it costs about $60,000 a year, most can’t afford an intensive program for their children, and so their children’s opportunities to achieve their maximum developmental potential are squandered.
• In California, children ages 0 to 3 years immediately receive ABA based services as soon as they’re identified as being at risk of having autism.
• Research shows that individuals with autism who don’t receive IBI require lifelong specialized services that cost, per person, upwards of $4 million – millions of dollars more than it costs to provide them with sufficient IBI therapy.¹
• IBI has been proven to be highly effective for children with all degrees of autism, but in Ontario, it is only provided to children diagnosed as “moderate” to “severe”.
• In Ontario, children regularly have their IBI treatment prematurely stopped without the insights of the child’s therapeutic program director, or scientific data documenting the child’s progress, being taken into consideration.
• The Ontario government’s current annual IBI budget is $150 million. In addition to the 1,650 children on the waitlist, there are 1,350 receiving service/partial funding. If you divide the budget amount by 3,000 children (total number of children), you get $50,000 per child – enough for 25 hours of IBI per child, per year.
• For each special needs child that enters school, the Ministry of Education provides the school board with up to $60,000 per year – that’s more than the annual cost of IBI therapy for most school-age children with autism who’ve already received early IBI. However, currently this money isn’t spent directly on services for these children.²

¹ Friends of Children with Autism Fact Sheet, http://dawn.thot.net/autism_fact_sheet.html and The Cost-Effectiveness of Expanding Intensive Behavioural Intervention to All Autistic Children in Ontario http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2585334

² Wynberg v. Ontario, 2005 CanLII 8749
http://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2005/2005canlii8749/2005canlii8749.html