As Colin Perkel of the Toronto Star is reporting late this afternoon, the Ontario appeals court has left a door open for parents to continue to sue boards of education for publicly funded autism treatment within the school system.  Perkel writes:

“In a unanimous ruling, the Ontario Court of Appeal essentially handed back the parents some of their claims against the Ontario government and seven school boards, saying they need to be substantially reworked if they are to have any hope of succeeding in their lawsuit.”

“The Appeal Court rejected the parents’ negligence claims against the Ontario government, but left open the possibility that the school boards might yet be on the hook for how they ran programs aimed at accommodating children with special needs.”

“The court also tossed out a claim based on age discrimination related to Ontario’s now-rescinded decision to pay for ABA for children only until age six.”

So, while a door is slightly ajar in that parents can resubmit their case, it is far from open. I suspect that, in the end, the parents will only partially win. Why? Because therapy and treatment are under the Ministry of Health, Long Term Care and Community and Social Services — not the Education Ministry.

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Bill Curry of the Globe and Mail quotes Finance Minister Jim Flaherty as saying “I don’t pretend that it’s easy to draw the line.” The line he is talking about is between independent films that are socially acceptable and contextual compared to those that include “gratuitous violence, sexual content that lacks an educational purpose, or denigration of an identifiable group.”And, I would suggest that most people over the age of 18 know hate and pornography when they see it. 

Yet, independent film makers like “David Cronenberg and Sarah Polley are leading a campaign against the bill, describing it as a form of censorship.” To my mind the only censorship that is involved is access to public money, our money, taxpayers money. Moreover, as Curry writes:“Canadian Heritage officials said the law will trigger consultations on new rules that will expand the criteria for denying the [tax] credits….”

In other words, once it is law, C-10 would allow Heritage officials to: (1) deny certain tax credits for certain films so that public money, taxpayers money, is not paying for them; and (2) provide for public consultantion to set new rules on what is art compared to hate, gratuitous violence and pornography.

So, while David Cronenberg and Sarah Polley and others say C-10 is about censorship,  I would suggest it isn’t because the law would NOT stop anyone from making independent films.  Rather, what C-10 would do is provide a mechanism to deny public money.

C/P at Jack’s Newswatch.

**Updates at the end of this post. 

Earlier this week I wrote a post about the possibility that parents were being disregarded by the medical and scientific community with regard to the alleged role of vaccines in the onset of autism. Now, we have a related story that New Hampshire blogger Kathleen Seidel has been served with a subpoena regarding her scrutiny of a particular law suit against the vaccine maker Bayer. 

For those who do not know of Seidel, she has a weblog called “neurodiversity.com,” a view of autism that is very different from the norm.  My understanding is that neurodiversity advocates would prefer that people stop discussing autism in negative terms. Instead, as the term neuro-diversity suggests, people with autism should be seen simply as thinking, perceiving and processing differently than average people — who are referred to as neuro-typicals. While I can agree with that description for individuals who are high functioning, it has not been my personal or professional experience. 
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What I am about to say is going to be controversial but in my opinion it needs to be said. While the media carefully report that the vaccine-autism debate is between the parents of children with autism and the scientific and medical communities, that is not telling it like it is. It is really about the medical and scientific community not believing and discounting what parents report, and in doing so, by failing to apportion any value in anecodotal evidence – which can be used to support statistical results.

Parents are not being unrealistic. I knew from the time my infant son came home from the hospital that there was something wrong with him because he cried constantly, would not allow anyone to hold him and his natural sucking instinct was not working. So, while I can assume my son did not acquire the symptoms of autism following vaccinations, I understand exactly what these parents are going through.

Forty two years ago, physicians would not believe what I was telling them either because all my son’s medical and laboratory tests came back negative. As a result, nothing I said was believed and rather than look for possible reasons, it was easier to say there was no problem.

However, without going into a lifetime of testing and treatment, the medical establishment in the late 1960’s were wrong, very wrong. They simply did not yet have the testing instruments available to make a correct determination when he was a toddler. Over his childhood and youth he would be diagnosed with ADHD, PDD and so on — and finally as a young adult with Aspergers.
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There is currently a law suit working its way through the Ontario courts. That law suit, by parents of autistic children, could change what goes on in our classrooms. While at the moment, most children with severe special needs have an Educational Assistant (EA) assigned to work with them, they do not have access to therapy, referred to either as ABA or IBI (intensive behaviour intervention).  

However, that could all change if the law suit is successful.  If successful, it would mean that school boards across the province would have to provide behavioural therapists to work with the children right in the classroom, alongside the EA’s. And, if those kind of changes come about in Ontario, you can assume they will eventually happen all across Canada.

That change is huge because boards rarely, if ever, hire health care providers and that is what behaviour therapists would be. Am I in favour? Yes, because the costs that are spent now when the children are young are more than made up later in life when the children with severe autism are taught life skills — skills that will allow them to be independent and fully integrated into the community.

And, who among us would not be in favour of that kind of outcome?

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Note: H/T to Cathy for sending me this source.

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Just released from the Toronto Star online is the article “Ontario spent $2.4M in autistic court battle.” Just imagine how many IBI (Intensive Behaviour Intervention) treatments that would have paid for.  What I found most interesting in the article was not just the purported costs but the McGuinty government spin. For example: 

“Bryant [Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant] said the total — $2,414,431 — covers more than seven years of legal fees and includes $620,000 for various costs like court transcripts, and almost $1.8 million for the salaries of government lawyers who helped in the fight.”

So, given the fact that Mr. Bryant is talking about seven years, what does that spin suggest? It would appear that they either want to apportion the blame (with the previous conservative government) and/or they are trying to hide how much they actually spent. Therefore, what I would like to see is a breakdown of the costs — those spent by the previous conservative government and those spent by the McGuinty government.  

Moreover, lets also remember, it was the McGuinty Liberals who refused to release these figures in the first place, to either NDP critic MPP Shelley Martel or Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian. No, the Ontario Liberals only released this information because they had to – as a result of a Superior Court decision.

And, like I said at the start of this post, how many IBI and other specialized treatments could that money have provided? And, what is the McGuinty government really going to spend on those services now that they have supposedly been approved? And, what does Ontario conservative leader John Tory plan to do if he is elected premier on October 10, 2007?  

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