Social Services Minister Todd Smith during a stop in Thunder Bay
The provinces’s minister of social services points to northern Ontario’s geography as a challenge to delivering autism services in the region.
Todd Smith toured northwestern Ontario this past week to hear about what obstacles stand in the way on improving services here.
“You don’t have the same number of clinicians, you don’t have the same number of medical professionals that you have in southwestern Ontario. So it makes the delivering of services to families a lot more difficult because of the geography.”
The social services minister adds no government has gotten the autism file right which is the reason for the extra effort in getting it right this time for as many children as possible.
“Making sure that we have a program that is sustainable, that will stay within that $600-million envelope, and won’t require us to be back here a year, or 2 years, or 3 years from now.”
The government minister noted he has increased funding for autism services over what the last government had done.
