BY REID JOHNSON, TIMES COLONIST
Minister of Children and Family Development Mary Polak claims she improved services for autistic children by cutting the Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention program at Queen Alexandra Centre for Child Health. This is nonsensical.
Cumulatively, she has cut more than $3 million provincewide from autism services for children under six.
In her announcement last September, Polak tried to disguise this cut as an improvement in service, claiming that eliminating Queen Alexandra's $5-million intensive therapy program allows the government to increase funding for all autistic children under 6 from $20,000 to $22,000.
Given the number of autistic children in the province, this actually reduced overall funding to the under-six group by more than $3 million.