I believe the Ontario Government’s new Autism Program likely is an overall cut in program funding. Here’s why.
One of the big assumptions in the provincial government’s recent announcement is that the province isn’t cutting (or increasing) the total dollars spent in the Ontario Autism Program, they’re simply taking the existing pot of money and spreading it over a large group of kids.
But how do we actually know that’s true? They’ve released no costing figures and they don’t seem to be particularly emphasizing the revenue neutrality of the change. We’ve all just kind of taken it as an article of faith.
But as my old stats prof used to say: “In God we trust, all others show their math.”
I would love to be able to do a full costing on this, but there’s so much we don’t know. What is the maximum funding level for a given year? (or are there yearly caps at all?) How do the income phaseouts work? Are there separate income phaseouts for dual-income and single-income families? How many kids from each age bracket do they expect will be eligible for the program? What will families be able to spend the money on? Etc. etc.
Given what we know so far, I would bet bucks-to-beers that this is a significant cut in overall program funding, particularly if it’s true that dual-income families start to see their funding clawed back for income levels of $55,000. There’s just so many carve-outs to this program which reduce overall government expenditure.
But I can’t be sure without more information. Here’s what I’d like to know from the government (and would love the media to press the government on):
- Without these changes, what was the expected cost of the OAP for fiscal years 2019–20, 2020–21 and 2021–22?*
- Details on the funding model, including all carve-outs.
- What is their expected cost of the new program for fiscal years 2019–20, 2020–21 and 2021–22? What are the assumptions underlying this costing? (Number of kids? Ages? Income levels? Etc.)
I would be shocked if the government hasn’t, in fact, substantially cut overall funding under this new model. I invite them to prove me wrong.
*Edited to add:
I took a few minutes to go through the Ontario Public Accounts, to figure out how much the government has spent in the past. This should give us a decent idea what projected future spending would be without the changes. Nice thing about using the Public Accounts is you can find out how much the government actually spent, not just what they budgeted. Fortunately, the figure was pretty easy to find:
Here’s the expenditure for the last 7 fiscal years:
- 2011–12 $181,398,203
- 2012–13 $181,943,098
- 2013–14 $188,063,522
- 2014–15 $187,722,976
- 2015–16 $189,080,119
- 2016–17 $254,633,529
- 2017–18 $317,801,400
These figures tell a pretty dramatic story. The previous government let funding stagnate despite rapidly increasing needs. Not only was it not keeping up with rising needs, it wasn’t even keeping up with inflation!
This caused an absolutely massive backlog, which they started to address in 2016, which saw a substantially increased budget.
Looking at these numbers, you have to figure with no changes, the government would have spent 350 million or more. Perhaps a fair bit more.
If there’s no change in planned spending, then the government is planning to spend 350M+ on a population of, I believe, 30000–32000 kids (would love to get an exact figure from the government here). So average spending would need to be over $10,000 per child, per year, if there was no funding change. Given the maximum expenditure for most age groups is $5,000 and there are substantial income clawbacks, it strikes me as incredibly unlikely average spending will be this high. In other words, this is a cut. Probably a big one.
Eyeballing it, I bet the expenditure will be a lot closer to the former $180M range. Without more info, it’s impossible to know. So, government, prove me wrong. Show me that this isn’t a massive cut in program funding.
