Public services for autistic children in Canada are severely underfunded

Evidence

There was a time when I was desperate to find these parents—to talk to someone, anyone, who might know what my family was going through. T. was born where we now live in British Columbia, but when he was a few months old, we moved to Toronto to be close to Avi’s family and big-city services. Except it turned out that for kids like T., those services were extremely scarce. The doctor who diagnosed him warned us that the wait list to access government-covered therapy could be years long. He also said that early intervention was “critical.” Kindergarten at our local public school nearly broke us: thirty kids in the class, five of them with developmental challenges; one teacher; and one amazing teaching assistant. The teacher went on health leave and never returned; the assistant became so stressed by the impossibility of her job that she transferred to another district. “I could have changed those five kids’ lives,” she told me later. “But not five plus the other twenty-five.” There was one “autism team” serving hundreds of schools; they made it to T.’s class ten days before the end of the school year. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 635

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the structural-abandonment thesis from earlier chapters — public systems failing families is precisely the kind of grievance the Mirror World metabolizes.