While this site is primarily about education funding, autism funding stands beside education funding offering a modicum of relief in an otherwise austere landscape. The kids get toys with that funding. They get therapy services, which have been invaluable.
On 10 February 2026, the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development announced a fundamental restructuring of disability supports for children and youth, replacing the existing autism funding program with two new streams: the BC Children and Youth Disability Benefit and the BC Children and Youth Disability Supplement. The announcement was framed as an expansion—$475 million in new funding, thousands more families served, greater flexibility and fairness.
The reality for many families currently receiving autism funding is more complicated.
The current system
Under the existing autism funding program, any child with a confirmed autism diagnosis receives direct funding:
Under age 6: up to $22,000 per year
Ages 6–18: up to $6,000 per year
This funding is universal within the diagnostic category. If your child has an autism diagnosis, your child receives funding. There is no income test. There is no functional severity threshold. The diagnosis itself is the gateway.
Approximately 27,000 children in BC currently receive this funding.
What replaces it
The existing autism funding program terminates on 31 March 2027. Two new programs replace it.
The Disability Benefit (higher tier)
The BC Children and Youth Disability Benefit provides either $6,500 or $17,000 per year based on assessed need. This is the higher funding tier—but it is no longer available to all autistic children.
Eligibility is restricted to children with what the ministry defines as “the highest functional support needs.” The official guide specifies two pathways:
For children who do not meet a direct-admit category but still have severe functional impacts, eligibility may be established through:
a professionally administered functional assessment
health-care provider attestation confirming prolonged disability and significant adaptive limitations
consideration of complexity, behavioural profile, and real-world functional impact
The ministry estimates 12,000 to 15,000 children will qualify for this benefit—roughly half the number currently receiving autism funding.
The Disability Supplement (lower tier)
The BC Children and Youth Disability Supplement provides up to $6,000 per year per child, but it is income-tested. Eligibility is determined by the federal Disability Tax Credit (DTC), not by MCFD assessment.
The ministry guide provides specific phase-out examples:
Family net income
1 eligible child
2 eligible children
3 eligible children
$50,000
$6,000/year
$12,000/year
$18,000/year
$100,000
$4,000/year
$10,000/year
$16,000/year
$180,000
$800/year
$6,800/year
$12,800/year
The supplement phases out completely at approximately $200,000 income for one eligible child, $350,000 for two eligible children.
First payments begin July 2027.
This supplement is available to any family whose child qualifies for the federal DTC, regardless of whether the child also qualifies for the higher-tier Disability Benefit. Families can receive both if they meet both eligibility criteria.
What the new system gets right
Children with Down syndrome, FASD with intellectual disability, cerebral palsy, and other conditions previously excluded from autism funding will now access direct funding for the first time. The Disability Benefit’s expansion beyond autism to a broader disability framework is a genuine improvement for families who have long watched autistic children receive $6,000 annually while their children with equivalent needs received nothing.
The Supplement’s flexibility—no invoicing, no audit, family-directed spending—is structurally better than the Disability Benefit’s accountability requirements. Families can use the money for tutoring, respite, sibling counselling, or any disability-related expense without submitting receipts or justifying choices to ministry workers. This autonomy matters.
The commitment to fund both benefits for eligible families—Disability Benefit and Disability Supplement stacking rather than offsetting—means the highest-need families may receive up to $23,000 annually ($17,000 Benefit plus $6,000 Supplement), substantially more than the current $6,000 autism funding for school-aged children.
The $80 million expansion of community-based services, if implemented as promised, will increase access to free therapies and supports across the province. The timeline is slow (full implementation not until 2028), but the investment is real.
Who loses funding
The structural logic is now visible: the new system creates two tiers of disabled children.
Children who will likely qualify for the Disability Benefit:
Autistic children with co-occurring intellectual disability (any level of autism, any level of ID)
Autistic children with Level 3/Profound Autism diagnoses
Autistic children with co-occurring bipolar disorder, psychosis, schizophrenia spectrum disorders, or catatonia
Autistic children already in the At-Home Program
Children with Down syndrome, FASD with intellectual disability, and other specified conditions
Children who will likely NOT qualify for the Disability Benefit:
Autistic children with Level 1 or Level 2 diagnoses and no intellectual disability
Autistic children whose impairments manifest as burnout, school refusal, demand avoidance, anxiety, or internalised distress rather than the externally visible markers the medical model codes as “severe”
Twice-exceptional (gifted and disabled) autistic children
Autistic children with PDA profiles
Autistic children with ADHD, learning disabilities, or other co-occurring conditions not listed in the direct-admit criteria
Children with FASD alone (without intellectual disability)
These children may still qualify for the income-tested Supplement—but only at the reduced rate their family income produces. A middle-income family will receive substantially less than the current $6,000 per child.
The needs-based review pathway theoretically allows some of these children to qualify, but eligibility is discretionary and requires documentation that burnt-out, demand-avoidant, or school-refusing children may be unable to generate.
What this means in practice
Consider a family with two autistic children, both with DTC eligibility, where both children experience significant functional impairment—school refusal, inability to attend therapy, profound daily support needs—but neither has intellectual disability, neither is Level 3, and neither meets any other direct-admit category.
Current funding (until March 2027):
$6,000 per child per year
$12,000 total
Not income-tested
Post-transition funding (from July 2027):
Disability Benefit: likely ineligible (neither child meets the direct-admit criteria; needs-based review is discretionary)
Disability Supplement: income-tested
At a family income of $100,000, the ministry’s own guide indicates the Supplement would be approximately $4,000 per child—a total of $8,000 per year.
Net annual loss: $4,000.
At a family income of $180,000, the Supplement drops to approximately $800 per child—a total of $1,600 per year.
Net annual loss: $10,400.
The children’s needs have not changed. The family’s costs have not decreased. The policy has simply decided these children are less disabled than children whose impairments present in ways the eligibility criteria recognise.
The “Ollie” example
The ministry’s own guide includes a persona called “Ollie”—an autistic child who is “highly verbal,” does not have intellectual disability, but “struggles significantly in social interactions and requires intensive social skill development” along with “modifications at home, school, and in all environments to ensure he remains self-regulated.”
The guide explicitly states: “Ollie does not qualify for the BC Children and Youth Disability Benefit.”
At a household income of $120,000, Ollie’s family receives only the Supplement: $3,200 per year.
Under the current system, a child diagnosed at age 6 would receive $78,000 in autism funding over childhood. Under the new system, Ollie receives approximately $48,000—a $30,000 reduction in lifetime support.
The ministry presents this as acceptable because Ollie “will be prioritised for access to free community programming.” But community programming is not direct funding. It cannot be directed by families toward the specific supports their child needs. It is whatever the province chooses to offer, wherever the province chooses to offer it, on whatever timeline the province chooses to implement it.
What the funding can be used for
Current autism funding
The current program allows funding to be used for:
Therapies and interventions
Behaviour consultants and interventionists
Family counselling (explicitly eligible since April 2021)
Travel, training, and equipment (up to 20% of allocation)
Many families use this flexibility strategically—for example, using funding for parental therapy when a burnt-out child cannot attend their own appointments.
The new Disability Benefit
The Disability Benefit must be used for “disability-related supports that improve a child’s functioning and daily life,” guided by an approved Support Plan.
Eligible expenses include:
Therapies and interventions
Respite
Mental health services (for child, siblings, or primary caregivers)
Inclusion supports
Assistive devices
Some diagnostics and assessments
Certain medical travel and training expenses
The ministry proposes that families may use up to 20% on “supports that do not fall into direct service or intervention categories.” The full eligible/ineligible expense policy will be developed during Phase 1.
The new Disability Supplement
The Supplement is “flexible household income support.” The ministry guide explicitly states: “Families decide how to use it, emphasizing greater flexibility and autonomy.”
Suggested uses include tutoring, therapies, counselling for siblings, childcare, respite, and “extra disability-related costs not covered elsewhere.”
Because the Supplement is administered by CRA rather than MCFD, there is no invoicing requirement and no audit of how funds are spent.
The announcement includes a provision for children “without a diagnosis but with severe functional impacts” to establish eligibility “through a cumulative needs assessment or review,” including “a professionally administered functional assessment or a health-care provider attestation.”
This sounds like flexibility. In practice, it creates a new gatekeeping barrier.
A child too burnt out to attend school is often too burnt out to attend assessment appointments. A child with demand avoidance cannot perform on demand for evaluators. A child who has withdrawn entirely—who cannot leave their room, who cannot tolerate therapy, who cannot engage with professionals—cannot generate the documentation the assessment process requires.
The real impact on families
Many families use autism funding not for direct therapy for their child, but for the supports that keep the family functional enough to care for a disabled child: parent therapy, sibling counselling, tutoring for children who cannot access school-based education.
The current program explicitly permits family counselling as an eligible expense. Parents who cannot get their burnt-out child to attend OT appointments can instead use the funding to access their own therapy—therapy that allows them to remain regulated, present, and capable of supporting a child in crisis.
Under the new income-tested Supplement, families with moderate incomes will have less funding to direct toward these supports. A family earning $100,000—not wealthy, but too high to receive the full Supplement—loses $2,000 per child annually. That is sessions cut, supports triaged, decisions about whether parental therapy or the child’s tutoring gets sacrificed.
The Supplement’s flexibility (no invoicing, no audit, CRA-administered) is genuinely better than the Disability Benefit’s accountability requirements. But flexibility means little when the amount has been halved.
The timeline
Date
What happens
Now – March 2027
Current autism funding continues; new families can still apply until 1 March 2027
April 2026
At-Home Program SAET recipients begin transition to Disability Benefit (first cohort)
July 2026
Autism Funding recipients begin transition discussions (second cohort)
31 March 2027
Autism funding program terminates; final invoices accepted
April 2027
Disability Benefit fully operational
July 2027
First Disability Supplement payments
The ministry states that current benefits “will remain in place until you are successfully transitioned to the new system of services.” For families whose children do not meet Disability Benefit eligibility, “successfully transitioned” may simply mean: your funding ends, here is the Supplement application process.
What families should do now
Apply for the Disability Tax Credit immediately if you do not have it. The Supplement flows through CRA based on DTC status. Processing takes 10–15 weeks. If you are not DTC-approved by July 2027, you will not receive Supplement payments, and payments will not be retroactive.
Know that you can use autism funding to cover the DTC application fee. The ministry guide confirms families currently receiving autism funding may use their Travel, Training and Equipment (TTE) budget to cover the cost of having a medical practitioner complete Form T2201 (up to $300, with receipt). This cannot be used for third-party DTC application services.
Gather functional assessment documentation. If your child has recent Vineland-3, PEDI-CAT, or GMFCS assessments, these may be relevant to Disability Benefit eligibility through the needs-based review pathway. The ministry states it will “engage and co-develop criteria with the sector/clinical experts to define the functional assessment process” during Phase 1—meaning the criteria do not yet exist.
Document everything. School refusal, therapy non-attendance, daily support needs, functional limitations—keep records. If you pursue the needs-based review pathway, you will need evidence of impact that exists outside formal assessment contexts.
Calculate your likely Supplement amount. Using the ministry’s published examples:
At $50,000 income: $6,000 per child
At $100,000 income: $4,000 per child
At $180,000 income: $800 per child
Plan for the gap. If you are likely to lose funding, begin identifying which supports you will need to cut or fund out of pocket.
Attend ministry information sessions. Virtual sessions are being held in February 2026. Details at gov.bc.ca/ChildYouthSupports.
The framing versus the reality
The minister spoke of “the power of Mom”—parents who “stretch themselves to ensure that their kids have what they need and continue to fight for the right to support.”
The policy announced the same day reduces funding for families whose children do not fit categorical definitions of severity, income-tests the replacement benefit, and creates assessment barriers that burnt-out children cannot navigate.
The $475 million in new funding is real. So is the expansion to children with other disabilities who were previously excluded. These are genuine improvements for some families.
But for families of autistic children without intellectual disability—children who are profoundly impaired but administratively “Level 1,” children who cannot attend school but can speak fluently, children whose nervous systems have collapsed under demands the world refuses to stop making—this announcement is not an expansion.
It is a reduction dressed in the language of equity.
Further implications
Who was left out of the direct-admit criteria
The Disability Benefit’s direct-admit pathway reflects a narrow, medicalised hierarchy of autism severity. Level 3 autism qualifies. Autism with intellectual disability qualifies. Autism with psychosis or catatonia qualifies.
Conspicuously absent:
Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) profiles. Children whose autism manifests as extreme demand avoidance experience profound functional impairment—they cannot attend school, cannot tolerate therapy, cannot comply with the assessment processes that would document their impairment. The demand to prove disability is itself the demand they cannot meet. PDA is not a separate diagnosis in the DSM-5, but it is a recognised autism presentation with a substantial evidence base, and it produces disability as severe as any Level 3 presentation. The ministry’s criteria do not mention it.
Twice-exceptional (2e) children. Gifted autistic children, gifted ADHD children, and children with both—these children experience a specific form of educational disability. Their cognitive capacity disqualifies them from supports designed for intellectual disability; their dysregulation, sensory overwhelm, or demand avoidance prevents them from accessing the education their cognition could otherwise manage. The gap between capacity and access is the disability. It is nowhere in the eligibility criteria.
Autistic burnout and school refusal. A child who once attended school but has collapsed under accumulated demands—who now cannot leave their room, cannot tolerate appointments, cannot engage with the world—is not captured by diagnostic severity levels assigned years earlier. The ADOS score from age 5 does not reflect the functional reality at age 12. Burnout is acquired disability layered onto existing neurodevelopmental difference, and the criteria do not account for it.
ADHD alone. Children with ADHD and no autism diagnosis are entirely absent from the Disability Benefit framework, regardless of functional impact. A child with severe ADHD who cannot attend school, cannot regulate, cannot function without intensive support receives nothing from this program unless they also carry an autism or intellectual disability diagnosis.
FASD without intellectual disability. The direct-admit criteria specify “concurrent FASD and intellectual disability.” Children with FASD alone, whose executive function deficits produce profound daily impairment, do not automatically qualify.
The needs-based review pathway theoretically captures some of these children, but eligibility is discretionary, the criteria have not yet been developed, and the process requires documentation that demand-avoidant, burnt-out, or disengaged children are least able to produce.
Geography and the hidden inequity of income-testing
The Supplement’s income test applies a single provincial threshold: full benefits at $50,000 family net income, phased reductions above that, near-complete phase-out by $200,000 for one child.
This new framework ignores the radical variation in cost of living across British Columbia.
A family earning $100,000 in Prince George, where a two-bedroom apartment averages $1,400 per month, is in a fundamentally different economic position than a family earning $100,000 in Vancouver, where the same apartment costs $2,800 or more. The income test treats these families as equivalent. They are not.
In Vancouver, $100,000 gross income translates to approximately $75,000 take-home. A family paying $2,875 in rent—not unusual for a Vancouver two-bedroom—spends $34,500 annually on housing alone: 46% of net income before food, utilities, transportation, childcare, or any disability-related expenses. The $4,000 Supplement (reduced from $6,000 due to income) is supposed to offset costs that the remaining income cannot cover. It does not.
The province already recognises geography in other policy domains. Northern living allowances exist. Remote community supplements exist. The principle that location shapes what income can buy is not novel. But MCFD built a benefit with no geographic adjustment, treating Smithers and Surrey as economically interchangeable.
The effect is regressive: families in high-cost urban centres—often the same centres where disability specialists, autism-informed therapists, and accessible services are concentrated—receive less support precisely because they followed their children’s needs to places where those needs could be met. The policy punishes families for living where the services are.
I can help expand that section to highlight the loss of therapeutic choice and fit. Here’s a deeper exploration:
The fiction of equivalent access
The ministry’s response to families who lose Disability Benefit eligibility emphasises expanded community-based services: more therapies, more mental health supports, more programming for children aged 6–18, all delivered free through community agencies. The framing suggests this compensates for reduced direct funding—that what families lose in cash they gain in services.
This is not equivalent access. It is the replacement of family autonomy with system control.
What direct funding allowed
Direct funding gave families the power to select providers based on therapeutic fit, not administrative availability. A family whose child has a PDA profile could search for practitioners who understand pathological demand avoidance—clinicians who recognise that traditional behavioural approaches escalate rather than resolve distress, who work collaboratively rather than directively, who frame support around nervous system regulation rather than compliance training.
That search is difficult. PDA-informed practice is rare. Most therapists trained in autism intervention learned ABA-derived methods that treat demand avoidance as a behaviour to extinguish rather than a neurological response to manage. Finding a provider who understands the distinction—who will not inadvertently traumatise a PDA child by imposing the very demand structures that collapse their capacity—requires time, research, often multiple consultations before the right fit emerges.
Autism funding made that search possible. Families could trial providers, end relationships that were not working, redirect funds toward practitioners whose approach matched their child’s neurology. The money followed the family’s clinical judgment, not a centrally determined service model.
A family whose autistic child is also twice-exceptional—gifted and disabled—could hire an educational therapist who understands the specific pedagogical challenges of a child whose intellectual capacity far exceeds their executive function, whose asynchronous development means they can analyse Shakespearean themes but cannot organise a paragraph, who needs acceleration in some domains and intensive support in others. That therapist exists in the private market. They do not work for community agencies delivering standardised programming to age-banded cohorts.
A family whose child has shut down entirely—school-refusing, unable to leave the house, too burnt out to tolerate any therapeutic demand—could redirect autism funding toward their own therapy, toward sibling counselling, toward respite that keeps the parent functional while the child remains unreachable. The current program explicitly permits family counselling as an eligible expense. Parents could use funding to sustain themselves through the crisis their child could not participate in resolving.
What community-based services offer
Community-based services are delivered by agencies, using agency-selected modalities, on agency timelines, in agency locations. Families do not choose the therapist. They do not choose the therapeutic approach. They do not redirect funding if the fit is poor. They accept what is offered or they go without.
The ministry has committed $80 million to expand these services, with full implementation by 2028. The announcement does not specify how many of these new therapists will be PDA-informed, how many will understand demand avoidance as a neurological presentation rather than a behavioural problem to be managed through reinforcement schedules. The default training pipeline for autism interventionists in BC remains heavily behavioural. Community agencies hire from that pipeline. The likelihood that expanded services will include widespread access to PDA-aware, neurodiversity-affirming, collaborative practitioners is low.
For families whose children cannot tolerate standard therapeutic approaches, “expanded access” means expanded access to services their child cannot use. The therapy is free. It is also iatrogenic. A PDA child subjected to behavioural intervention that ignores demand avoidance will escalate, not improve. The family loses both the funding they previously controlled and the therapeutic relationship they had built with a provider who understood their child.
Geographic inequity and the rural gap
Community-based services cluster where populations cluster. Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna, Prince George—these centres will see new programming, new hires, new clinical capacity. Rural and remote families will see a therapist visiting monthly instead of quarterly, a support group offered via Zoom instead of not at all.
This is an improvement over nothing. It is not equivalence with direct funding, which allowed rural families to hire providers who travelled to them, who worked remotely on family-determined schedules, who adapted to the logistical realities of living hours from the nearest city. A family in Haida Gwaii could use autism funding to bring an OT to the island for intensive consult, to pay for telehealth sessions with a mainland SLP, to cover travel costs for assessment appointments in Prince Rupert. Community-based services do not adapt to geography that way. They are place-based, and if your place is not where the service is located, you wait for the circuit-rider schedule or you access nothing.
The Supplement, being unrestricted cash, theoretically allows rural families to continue purchasing private services if they can afford the reduced amount and the travel surcharges rural providers charge. But a family earning $100,000 in a remote community—where housing may be cheaper but food, fuel, and travel are vastly more expensive—receives only $4,000 in Supplement income, half of what autism funding provided. The OT who used to visit for $2,000 per intensive session block is no longer affordable. The family redirects the Supplement toward heating bills and the child goes without.
The loss of family-directed spending
The current autism funding structure trusts families to know what their child needs. If the child is too burnt out to attend therapy, families can use the funding for parental counselling, for sibling support, for respite that prevents total family collapse. The family directs resources toward the leverage points that matter most in their specific situation, which may not be direct intervention with the child at all.
Community-based services do not offer that flexibility. They offer therapy for the child, delivered to the child, measured by the child’s participation. A child who cannot participate receives nothing, and the family that is struggling to remain functional while supporting that child receives nothing either. The system demands the child engage with services in order for the family to access support. For PDA children, for burnt-out children, for children in states of profound shutdown, that demand is the barrier they cannot cross.
The Supplement, being unrestricted, theoretically restores family autonomy—but only if the income-reduced amount is sufficient to purchase the supports the family previously accessed. At $4,000 annually for a middle-income family, it is not. The choice is theoretical. The family cannot afford the private providers who offered PDA-informed care, cannot afford the educational therapist who understood twice-exceptionality, cannot afford the respite worker who gave the parent six hours monthly to attend their own therapy. The money is flexible, but insufficient money is not autonomy.
The accountability inversion
Families receiving the Disability Benefit must submit a Support Plan, restrict spending to approved categories, provide invoicing or agency oversight. The highest-need children—those who meet direct-admit criteria—are subjected to the most intensive administrative burden.
Families receiving only the Supplement face no such requirements. The money arrives via CRA, no receipts required, no audit mechanism, no connection between funding and therapeutic use. The child deemed “not disabled enough” for the Benefit receives unrestricted cash while the child with intellectual disability and autism must document every expense.
This creates perverse incentives. Families who want autonomy and flexibility are better off if their child does not qualify for the higher funding tier, because qualifying means submitting to oversight. But qualifying also means receiving $17,000 instead of $6,000, so families cannot simply opt out. They must accept the accountability structure in order to access adequate funding.
The system thus penalises the families whose children have the most complex needs by demanding they justify their spending while simultaneously offering families with fewer resources complete autonomy over inadequate amounts. Neither structure is coherent, but the incoherence falls hardest on families navigating the direct-admit criteria: they receive more money and less freedom, more scrutiny and more documentation burden, more funding and more constraints on how that funding can deploy.
What PDA families lose specifically
For families of PDA children, the shift from direct funding to community-based services is not a lateral move. It is the replacement of a system that allowed therapeutic matching with a system that enforces therapeutic standardisation.
PDA children need practitioners who understand that:
Demands trigger fight-or-flight responses, not willful non-compliance
Behavioural charts, token economies, and contingency-based reinforcement escalate dysregulation
Collaborative problem-solving, indirect language, and autonomy-preserving frameworks reduce distress
The goal is regulation, not compliance; the method is environmental adaptation, not behavioural modification
Most community agencies do not train their staff in these principles. Most autism intervention programs in BC derive from behavioural traditions that explicitly reject the premise that demand avoidance is neurological rather than behavioural. A PDA child placed in a standard autism therapy group will be subjected to exactly the approaches that destabilise them: therapists will set expectations, impose structure, reward compliance, and interpret non-compliance as a behaviour requiring correction.
Families who understood this could previously use autism funding to avoid those programs entirely. They could hire the rare PDA-informed practitioner, pay the premium for specialised training, build a therapeutic relationship over years that understood their child’s specific neurology. That option required money the family controlled. Community-based services offer no such control. The family is told services are available, the child is placed in a program, and if the program is harmful the family’s recourse is to withdraw—which means going without.
The ministry has replaced a funding model that allowed families to protect PDA children from iatrogenic intervention with a service model that cannot guarantee those protections exist. The harm is not speculative. It is the foreseeable consequence of removing family autonomy over therapeutic selection and replacing it with agency-determined programming that does not account for PDA as a valid clinical presentation requiring distinct therapeutic response.
Single-parent households and the income-test penalty
The income thresholds make no adjustment for household composition. A single parent earning $100,000 and a two-parent household earning $100,000 combined receive identical Supplement amounts, despite radically different economic positions.
The single parent has one income, one set of hands, one adult managing all caregiving and all paid employment. The two-parent household has potential for income splitting, shared domestic labour, and the capacity for one parent to reduce paid work hours if caregiving demands increase. The $100,000 single-income household is far more precarious than the $100,000 dual-income household, but the policy treats them identically.
For single parents of disabled children—disproportionately mothers, disproportionately stretched beyond capacity—the income test compounds existing disadvantage. The parent who cannot split caregiving with a partner, who cannot trade off appointments and school pickups and crisis management, who earns “too much” by provincial standards while spending half their take-home on rent, receives reduced support precisely when support matters most.
Disability funding that does not require disability support
The ministry frames the Supplement as disability support—it is called the BC Children and Youth Disability Supplement, it is tied to DTC eligibility, it is described as helping families “with the costs of raising a child with support needs.” The rationale is disability-specific: these children have additional needs, those needs cost money, the state provides support.
But the mechanism is untethered from the rationale. There is no requirement that the money go toward disability-related expenses. No invoicing, no accountability, no connection between the funding and the child’s therapeutic needs. A family could—legally, within the policy’s design—spend the entire Supplement on anything at all. The child might receive no therapy, no intervention, no support. The policy does not care.
This creates a fundamental incoherence. If the goal is ensuring disabled children receive the services they need, an unrestricted cash transfer does not accomplish that goal. It accomplishes a different goal: supplementing household income for families with disabled children. That is a legitimate policy objective, but it is not the same objective, and the ministry is not honest about the substitution.
The current autism funding says, in effect, “your child is autistic, autism creates therapeutic needs, here is money for therapy.” The Supplement says, in effect, “your child is disabled, disability is expensive, here is some cash, good luck.” The child disappears from the transaction. The funding becomes about the family’s economic position, not the child’s developmental needs.
The policy also creates a two-tier accountability structure that punishes higher-need families. The Disability Benefit—for children who meet the direct-admit criteria—requires a Support Plan, restricts spending to approved categories, involves invoicing or agency oversight. These families must prove they are using funds appropriately. But the Supplement—for children who do not meet those criteria—has no such requirements. The logic is backwards: the families with the most complex needs face the most administrative burden, while families whose children were deemed “not disabled enough” for the Benefit receive unrestricted cash with no accountability at all.
A better design was available
The province chose to deliver the Supplement through CRA, piggybacking on the Canada Child Benefit infrastructure. This is administratively efficient. But CRA already has a mechanism that links payment to purpose: the Medical Expense Tax Credit.
The Medical Expense Tax Credit already exists. It already has a category for disability-related therapies and interventions. It already requires receipts, which means it already creates accountability—the money flows back to families because they spent it on documented medical expenses. The infrastructure is built.
If the province wanted to ensure the Supplement actually reached children in the form of services, they could have designed it as a refundable top-up to the federal Medical Expense Tax Credit for families with DTC-eligible children. Families would declare disability-related expenses, receive reimbursement up to the Supplement cap (income-adjusted), and retain receipts for audit. This is how the current autism funding already works for many expense categories: attestation with audit, not receipt-by-receipt submission.
This would accomplish several things the current design does not:
The money follows the child’s actual therapeutic use. Families receive support proportional to what they spent on the child’s needs, not a flat transfer disconnected from services.
Accountability exists without MCFD administrative burden. CRA already processes medical expense claims. The province piggybacks on federal infrastructure rather than building a parallel system or abandoning accountability entirely.
Families retain flexibility. The Medical Expense Tax Credit already covers a broad range of therapies, interventions, equipment, and disability-related costs. Families choose providers, choose modalities, choose timing—and receive reimbursement for documented expenses.
Families who stretch to spend more receive more support. A family earning $100,000 who spends $6,000 on therapy would receive $6,000 back (or a percentage based on the phase-out), rather than a flat $4,000 regardless of spending.
The obvious objection is cash flow: what about families who cannot afford to spend the money upfront and wait for reimbursement? Solutions exist—quarterly reimbursement rather than annual, advance payment based on projected expenses, reconciliation at year-end. The lowest-income families, who receive the full Supplement, could receive it as advance payment with attestation reconciled later.
The ministry chose not to do any of this. They chose untethered cash, zero accountability, no connection between funding and therapeutic use. It is simpler to administer. It allows them to claim they are supporting disabled children without ensuring that any given child actually receives support.
The provider ecosystem is about to contract
The current autism funding creates a protected revenue stream for therapists, behaviour consultants, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and the entire network of providers who serve autistic children. Families receive $6,000 per child annually that must be spent on approved services. The money cannot go to rent. It cannot go to groceries. It flows, by design, to providers.
Approximately 27,000 children receive autism funding. At $6,000 per school-aged child, that is roughly $162 million annually circulating through the provider economy—money that families spend because they cannot spend it elsewhere, money that providers can count on because the policy guarantees it.
After March 2027, for the 12,000–15,000 children who do not qualify for the Disability Benefit, this protected revenue stream disappears:
The Supplement arrives as unrestricted cash
Families facing Vancouver rents and rising grocery costs will, rationally, triage
Therapy becomes discretionary spending competing against survival expenses
Provider invoices do not get paid because there is no invoice system—there is only a family budget that cannot stretch
The families are not wrong to redirect the money. You cannot regulate your child in a therapy session if you have been evicted. You cannot drive to the OT appointment if you could not afford the car insurance. Shelter and food come before therapeutic intervention, and the ministry has handed families a benefit structure that forces that choice.
The providers, meanwhile, lose clients. A speech-language pathologist whose caseload is 40% autism-funded children will see that caseload shrink—not because families no longer need services, but because families can no longer guarantee payment. The therapist raises rates to compensate for lost volume, which further prices out the families still trying to access services. The market hollows out.
The $80 million expansion of community-based services is supposed to offset this, but community agencies do not absorb private-practice therapists. They hire their own staff, often at lower wages, often with wait lists, often with less specialisation than the private practitioners families have built relationships with. The private provider who built a practice serving autism-funded families does not transition smoothly into an agency role. They leave the field, reduce their disability caseload, or relocate to serve populations with more reliable funding streams.
The ministry has, in effect, destabilised a functioning provider market without building adequate public infrastructure to replace it. The community services expansion is phased over three years, with full implementation not until 2028. The autism funding ends March 2027. The gap is real, and providers will feel it before community services scale up to absorb demand.
The children caught in that gap—needing services, unable to afford private rates, waiting for community capacity that does not yet exist—will go without. The policy does not account for them.
What this means for schools
The ministry frames this announcement as expanding support for disabled children. School districts should prepare for the opposite: increased demand colliding with unchanged capacity.
The therapeutic infrastructure schools have offloaded to families
BC schools have operated for years within a scarcity model that depends on families purchasing privately what the system cannot provide. Speech-language pathology, occupational therapy, psychological assessment, academic tutoring—these are services districts nominally offer but cannot deliver at scale. Wait lists stretch across terms. Assessments arrive years late. Therapy happens once monthly where weekly intervention is indicated.
Autism funding created a workaround. Families received $6,000 annually that could not be spent on rent or groceries, only on services. That guaranteed therapeutic revenue stream built a private provider market, and schools quietly came to rely on it. The child who needed daily OT consult to manage sensory regulation in the classroom received that consult because the family paid for it. The autistic child with dyscalculia received math tutoring because autism funding covered it when the school eliminated resource pullouts. The demand on district psychologists and SLPs decreased because families were absorbing costs the system would otherwise carry.
School-based teams knew this. IEP meetings included the implicit assumption: the family will handle therapy privately, the school will manage educational programming, and between the two systems the child will receive adequate support. Neither system alone was sufficient, but together they held.
What happens when families redirect the Supplement
After March 2027, the 12,000–15,000 children who lose Disability Benefit eligibility will receive only the income-tested Supplement—and the Supplement arrives as unrestricted cash.
A family earning $100,000 and paying Vancouver rent ($2,875 monthly for a two-bedroom, $34,500 annually) is spending 46% of take-home income on housing before food, utilities, childcare, or any disability-related expense. That family currently receives $6,000 in autism funding that must go toward services. Under the new system, they receive $4,000 that can go anywhere.
The family will triage. Rent comes before therapy. Groceries come before tutoring. The $4,000 that was supposed to offset disability costs instead offsets survival expenses, because survival expenses have exceeded household capacity and the province has handed them a benefit with no strings attached.
The child who was receiving weekly OT consult funded through autism dollars no longer receives it. The family cannot afford the $150 session out of pocket, and the Supplement has already been absorbed by rent arrears and rising food costs. The sensory dysregulation that OT was managing—meltdowns in the classroom, inability to tolerate the cafeteria, withdrawal from group work—returns to the school to manage.
The autistic child with a math learning disability who was receiving private tutoring because the district eliminated resource room pullouts no longer receives tutoring. The family redirected the Supplement toward keeping the car insured so they can drive to medical appointments. The math gap widens. The child’s IEP lists accommodations, but accommodations do not teach foundational skills the child never acquired. The classroom teacher, managing 28 students with no dedicated support staff, cannot provide remedial one-on-one instruction. The child falls further behind.
The school receives the same child, with the same needs, but the private therapeutic scaffolding that was keeping the child functional has disappeared.
The demand schools cannot meet
School districts are already operating past capacity. The 2023 BC Teachers’ Federation workload survey documented the crisis in detail: 89% of teachers reported they could not meet the needs of students with diverse learning needs within their current workload. Districts across the province report psychologist vacancies they cannot fill, SLP caseloads that exceed best-practice ratios by multiples, and occupational therapy delivered once per term where weekly consult is clinically indicated.
The system has no reserve capacity to absorb the demand that autism funding was privately resolving. When families stop paying for OT, speech therapy, psychological consult, and academic tutoring, that demand does not disappear. It returns to schools as unmet need—children who dysregulate without sensory support, children who cannot access curriculum without remedial instruction, children whose behaviour escalates because the therapeutic intervention that was managing it has been withdrawn.
School-based teams will respond as they already do: they will triage. The child in crisis receives attention. The child who is struggling but not yet in crisis waits. Waiting lists lengthen. Assessment timelines extend. The gap between what the IEP promises and what the school can deliver widens further.
The inevitable recourse: exclusion
When schools cannot meet a child’s needs and cannot access external supports to bridge the gap, the system turns to the mechanisms it already uses to manage unmanageable demand: reduction of instructional hours.
Partial schedules—attending school for half days, or three days weekly instead of five—are already widespread across BC districts despite policy prohibition. The practice exists because schools lack the staff, the space, and the therapeutic infrastructure to support full-time inclusion for children with complex needs. Autism funding allowed some families to purchase the private supports that kept their children in school full-time. When that funding disappears or becomes inadequate, the children remain, but the supports do not.
The administrator facing a child who cannot regulate in the classroom without OT consult the family can no longer afford will suggest a modified schedule. The suggestion will be framed as meeting the child’s needs—”he does better with shorter days”—but the structural truth is that the school cannot manage the child’s dysregulation across a full school day without support staff it does not have. The partial schedule is not accommodation; it is managed exclusion.
Parents who refuse the reduction will be told the school is doing everything it can, which is true and irrelevant. The school is doing everything within its current capacity. The capacity is insufficient. The province has withdrawn the private funding stream that was compensating for that insufficiency, replaced it with unrestricted cash families will rationally spend on rent, and provided no corresponding increase in school-based staffing.
The children this will hurt most
The children losing Disability Benefit eligibility are, by design, the children the system has always served least effectively:
Autistic children without intellectual disability—children who are cognitively capable of grade-level work but cannot access it without support
Twice-exceptional children—gifted and disabled, falling through the gap between programs designed for developmental delay and programs designed for academic enrichment
PDA-profile children—demand-avoidant, unable to tolerate the compliance-based structures schools use to manage behaviour
Autistic girls—often masked, often dismissed as anxious rather than autistic, often excluded from resource allocation because their distress presents as internalised rather than externalised
These are the children schools already struggle to serve. They do not qualify for severe behaviour designations. They do not meet criteria for intensive support. Their IEPs list accommodations that classroom teachers cannot implement without additional staffing. Their families have been privately funding the gap between what the IEP promises and what the school delivers.
When the private funding disappears, the gap becomes visible in ways schools cannot ignore. The child who was managing with private OT support dysregulates without it. The child who was keeping pace with weekly tutoring falls behind without it. The need was always there. The family was absorbing it. Now the school must respond, and the school has no additional resources with which to respond.
What schools should prepare for
Increased referrals for assessment and intervention starting summer 2027, as families lose access to privately funded services
Longer wait lists for school psychologists, SLPs, and OTs as demand previously absorbed by the private market returns to the public system
Rising behaviour incidents among children who lose access to regulation supports
Increased requests for modified schedules and partial attendance as schools cannot meet full-time inclusion demands
Potential increases in parental complaints, advocacy requests, and Human Rights Tribunal filings as families discover the school cannot replace the private supports they have lost
More IEP meetings where the documented need exceeds the available staffing, forcing teams to choose between honest documentation (which exposes the gap) and managed documentation (which obscures the child’s actual requirements)
The ministry’s announcement includes $80 million for expanded community-based services, phased in through 2028. School districts should not assume this will resolve the pressure. Community agencies do not operate in schools. Their wait lists, their geographic coverage, and their capacity to absorb demand previously met by 27,000 families spending $162 million annually on private providers remain unclear. The funding ends March 2027. The replacement infrastructure will not be fully operational for another year after that.
The gap will land in schools, and schools should prepare accordingly.
What the province actually changed
Families with disabled children in British Columbia already receive two income-tested, unrestricted cash benefits:
Canada Child Benefit (CCB): Federal income support for all children, delivered monthly, no restrictions on use.
Child Disability Benefit (CDB): Federal top-up for DTC-eligible children (up to $3,173 annually), income-tested, no restrictions on use.
The province is now adding a third unrestricted, income-tested cash benefit – the BC Children and Youth Disability Supplement – that functions identically to the two that already exist.
What the province eliminated: the only earmarked therapeutic funding in BC that guaranteed services reached disabled children regardless of family economic position.
The impossible choice the province created
Poverty causes trauma. A family facing eviction cannot regulate a child in therapy sessions. A family unable to afford adequate food cannot expect developmental progress while the household is in crisis. Therapeutic intervention cannot resolve trauma that material conditions continue producing.
When families redirect the Supplement toward rent instead of occupational therapy, they are making the correct choice. Survival needs come first. The policy failure is not that families prioritize housing over therapy – the policy failure is that the province created conditions requiring that choice.
Autism funding was earmarked – families could only spend it on services. That restriction created protection. A parent who would never sacrifice rent money for therapy accessed therapy because the funding could not be redirected. Services happened because the money could only go one place.
The Supplement removes that protection. It arrives as unrestricted cash, competes against survival expenses, and disappears into rent and groceries for families under strain. A middle-income Vancouver family paying $34,500 annually in rent will backfill survival spending with the $4,000 Supplement. Nothing remains for therapy.
The stratification this creates
Children whose families have economic cushion continue receiving therapy – their parents can afford services after meeting survival needs.
Children whose families are stretched lose therapeutic access – the Supplement backfills survival expenses and therapy disappears.
The province has stratified therapeutic access by household income. Autism funding guaranteed services even for families under economic strain because restriction prevented redirection. The Supplement guarantees services only for families who can afford them after rent is paid.
We already had CCB and CDB for income support. Some part of the disability funding should have remained earmarked for therapeutic use.
The province eliminated that guarantee and replaced it with a third unrestricted cash benefit when two already existed.
