“If you never set the objective of getting rid of the waiting lists, then you
never will,” he said. “It won’t be easy, but it must be done.”
Mr. Tory
visited a daycare inside a fitness centre and met with a group of parents of
autistic children, including Steve Gensen and Leela Sharma, whose seven-year-old
daughter, Madi, was diagnosed several years ago.
The family waited a
year for their daughter to get a diagnosis and another year for treatment.
Before her diagnosis, Madi would spend up to 14 hours a day humming, her mother
said.
“We thought we were going crazy,” Ms Sharma said.
“All she wanted to do was rock and stand in a corner … and scream pretty much
all day.”
Intensive behaviour intervention (IBI) therapy can cost tens of thousands a
year for each child. Days before the last provincial election, Mr. McGuinty
promised in a letter to a month to extend IBI to children over the age of six,
ending the previous Conservative government’s “unfair and discriminatory”
practice of not extending the therapy to older children.
But Mr. McGuinty
did not meet that commitment until 2005 and continued to fight parents of
autistic children in a court case that predated his government.
David
Patchell-Evans, president of Autism Canada, said he trusts Mr. Tory to keep his
word because he is more a businessman than a politician.
“In business, if
you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, you know you’re going to fail,”
said Mr. Patchell-Evans, who is also the CEO of GoodLife Fitness Clubs. His
11-year-old daughter, Kilee, has autism.
“He says he’s going to do this,
and I believe him.”
Heading into the second half of the campaign, Mr. Tory also brushed off the
results of the latest SES Research poll. The poll of 500 Ontarians shows support for the major parties is
still stagnant, with the Liberals at 41%, the Tories at 33%, the New
Democrats with 18% support and the Greens with 8%.
“If you look at a
horse race and they’re on the back stretch halfway through, it’s not the time to
be predicting who’s going to win,” Mr. Tory said.
“I’m very confident
we’re doing just fine.”
