The Ford government could have been the closest thing to a hero that children with autism and their beleaguered families have ever had.

Instead, parents are once again at Queen’s Park in tears, fearing for the fate of their children and wondering if any government will ever help them.

The Wynne government got things mostly right when it ended arbitrary funding caps and age cut-offs and moved to a system that relied on trained behavioural therapists to provide treatment based on need.

The problem then was the money. There wasn’t enough, so wait-lists grew.

The Ford government latched on to the wait-list and vowed to eliminate it. If they had simply doubled the funding and made a few administrative tweaks to the existing program they could have had a real win on their hands, not to mention actually providing children with the care they desperately need.

But Ford just couldn’t do that. His government launched a new half-baked program, which spread the existing money more thinly through childhood budgets, and made things far worse.

Since then they’ve lurched from announcement to reversal to announcement to delay. Unbelievably, the government has doubled funding to $600 million a year but still hasn’t managed to provide for the needs of children with autism in this province.

On Tuesday, Children, Community and Social Services Minister Todd Smith continued this terrible trajectory by announcing that the government will continue with the program it knows doesn’t work until sometime in 2021 when it will finally “get this right.”

It takes a certain kind of ineptitude to double the funding for a program and still have its recipients hate you.

Talk about an own goal for the Ford government. And what a terrible tragedy for the children who will be three years older by the time this government gets around to fulfilling its promise to help them.

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