On February 10, 2026, the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development announced the most significant overhaul of children's disability funding in a generation. The existing Autism Funding program — which has supported families for over two decades — will be terminated by April 2027 and replaced with a new tiered system called the BC Children and Youth Disability Benefit, a means-tested Disability Supplement, and a promise of expanded community-based services.
The government framed this as progress. Minister Jodie Wickens spoke of a system that is "fairer, easier to access and better co-ordinated." The province committed $475 million over three years. New disability communities — families of children with Down syndrome, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, and other conditions — will receive direct funding for the first time.
We do not dispute that those families deserve support. They always have. The exclusion of children with non-autism disabilities from direct funding has been an injustice for decades, and the advocacy of organizations like Down Syndrome BC and the Down Syndrome Resource Foundation has been tireless and justified.
But we refuse to accept the premise that correcting one inequity requires creating new ones. And we refuse to stay silent while a policy announced with hopeful language quietly dismantles the infrastructure that families of autistic children built their lives around.
At the Sevan Childhood Foundation, we work on the front lines of early autism support in British Columbia. We fund diagnostic assessments for families who cannot afford them. We connect families to intervention services during the narrow developmental window when that intervention matters most. We work in communities — including South Asian communities in Surrey and the Fraser Valley — where cultural stigma, language barriers, and systemic neglect already make accessing support extraordinarily difficult.
We are raising the alarm. This policy, as announced, is not the step forward the government claims. It is a restructuring that prioritizes administrative tidiness over children's developmental needs, introduces bureaucratic gatekeeping where direct access once existed, and asks families to trust a system that has given them every reason not to.
Let us start with the numbers the government would prefer you not dwell on.
Under the current autism funding model, a child aged 3 to 5 receives up to $22,000 per year in direct, individualized funding. A child aged 6 to 18 receives up to $6,000 per year. That funding goes directly to the services the family chooses — behavioural intervention, speech therapy, occupational therapy — with the family directing how and where it is spent.
Under the new Disability Benefit, the maximum is $17,000 per year for children assessed as having the highest needs. The base tier is $6,500. The income-tested Disability Supplement adds up to $6,000 per year, but only for families earning under $50,000 at the full amount, phasing out entirely above $285,000.
70% Reduction
For families not qualifying for the highest tier
Consider what this means for a family with a three-year-old who has just been diagnosed with autism — a child without an intellectual disability, but with significant communication and behavioural support needs. Under the current system, that family receives $22,000 per year during the most critical developmental window. Under the new system, unless that child is assessed into the highest tier, the family could receive as little as $6,500. That is a 70% reduction in funding during the exact period when research shows early intensive intervention produces the greatest gains.
The government will point out that some families may qualify for both the Benefit and the Supplement. But the Supplement is means-tested and does not begin until July 2027. Even for families who eventually qualify for both, there is a gap — a period where funding drops and community services are not yet in place — during which children are losing irreplaceable developmental time.
The province says it is investing $475 million in new funding. But $298 million of that is redirected from existing autism funding. The truly new investment is approximately $177 million over three years. Spread across an additional 18,000 children, that amounts to roughly $3,300 per child per year. That is not transformational. That is thin.
Buried beneath the optimistic framing is a fact the government has not adequately addressed: an estimated 5,200 children currently receiving autism funding will lose all direct financial support under the new model. These are children whose needs are not deemed complex enough for the Disability Benefit and whose families earn too much for the means-tested Supplement.
These families will be told they can access community-based services instead. But the community-based service expansion does not fully roll out until spring 2028. The Autism Funding Unit closes in April 2027. That is a minimum one-year gap during which these families have neither direct funding nor adequate community alternatives.
These are not hypothetical losses. These are children currently receiving speech therapy, currently working with behavioural consultants, currently making progress. Their families will watch that progress stall — not because services stopped working, but because the government decided their children's needs were not severe enough to warrant continued support.
We find this unconscionable.
The current autism funding model operates on a principle that respects families: you receive a diagnosis, you receive funding, and you decide how to use it. You choose the providers. You choose the therapeutic approach. You choose the schedule. You pivot when something is not working. The clinical direction is driven by you, the parent, in consultation with the professionals you select and trust.
The new system replaces that autonomy with layers of bureaucratic oversight. To access the Disability Benefit, a child must either qualify through a narrow set of automatic diagnoses or undergo a functional needs assessment conducted by a ministry worker. A support plan must be developed and approved. Spending is subject to category restrictions — no more than 20% on non-intervention services without a special exception. Families must choose from three prescribed payment pathways, each with different levels of administrative burden.
The government calls this "support planning." We call it gatekeeping.
Who decides what constitutes "significant and complex developmental support needs"? Who determines whether a child's functional impact warrants the $17,000 tier or the $6,500 tier? A ministry worker. Not the family. Not the clinician who has spent hundreds of hours with the child. A government employee applying a standardized assessment framework.
This is not a minor procedural change. It is a fundamental shift in who holds decision-making power over a child's therapeutic journey. And it is being imposed on families who have, in many cases, spent years building expertise in their own child's needs — expertise that no standardized assessment can replicate.
AutismBC's executive director, Suzanne Perreault, has publicly acknowledged that questions remain about how the complexity of a child's autism will be measured. If the organizations closest to this issue do not yet understand how the assessment will work, how can families be expected to trust it?
The government states that this policy followed two years of engagement with families, service providers, and experts. Minister Wickens acknowledged that the failed 2021 attempt "missed the mark" and that the ministry needed to "pause and engage to get it right."
We ask: who was engaged?
The large advocacy organizations were at the table. Down Syndrome BC, the Down Syndrome Resource Foundation, the BC Disability Collaborative — their voices were heard, and rightly so. Their communities have been excluded for far too long.
But what about the thousands of families currently relying on autism funding who did not have a seat in those rooms? What about grassroots organizations working directly with underserved communities? What about the South Asian families in Surrey who may not follow ministry consultations published in English on government websites? What about the Indigenous families in northern BC who already face enormous barriers to accessing any services at all?
Meaningful consultation is not a series of meetings with established stakeholders. It is the hard, slow work of reaching the people whose lives will be disrupted — in their languages, in their communities, on their terms. We have seen no evidence that this standard was met.
And the manner of the announcement itself speaks volumes. Families learned on a Monday that the system they depend on will be dismantled within fourteen months. Public information sessions were scheduled for the following Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday — one of which was subsequently cancelled. The government's own guide for current service recipients runs to multiple pages of dense policy language. Families are expected to absorb a radical restructuring of their child's support system in a matter of days.
This is not how you treat people whose trust you need.
This is how you manage a communications rollout.
At the heart of our concern is a truth that the government's funding framework does not adequately reflect: autism intervention is neurologically time-sensitive.
Research consistently demonstrates that early, intensive intervention — particularly during ages 2 to 5 — produces the most significant and lasting improvements in communication, social skills, adaptive behaviour, and long-term independence. This is not an opinion. It is the overwhelming consensus of developmental neuroscience.
The current autism funding model recognized this reality by providing higher funding ($22,000) for children under six. The new model does not. A three-year-old and a fifteen-year-old with comparable functional assessments could receive the same $6,500 — despite the fact that the three-year-old's brain is in a fundamentally different developmental state, one that is uniquely responsive to intervention.
Brain is most neuroplastic and responsive to intervention. Early support produces lasting gains in communication, social skills, and independence.
Children who receive intensive early intervention show significantly better outcomes in school readiness, social integration, and quality of life.
A universal disability framework that treats all ages and all conditions the same is not equitable. It is uniform. Those are not the same thing.
Equity means allocating resources according to need. And the need for intensive early autism intervention is not comparable to the support needs of a teenager with a stable, well-managed condition. Treating them identically under a single funding formula is not fairness — it is administrative convenience dressed as principle.
The Sevan Childhood Foundation does not oppose expanding disability funding to children who have been excluded. We have always believed that every child deserves to be seen, supported, and understood.
But we insist that inclusion cannot come at the cost of adequacy.
The following changes are essential:
Children aged 2 to 5 with an autism diagnosis must have access to funding that reflects the intensity of intervention required during this critical developmental window. The current $22,000 annual amount should be maintained or increased for this age group, not reduced to a one-size-fits-all tier.
Community-based services must be operational before direct funding is terminated. Asking families to bridge a one-to-two-year gap with nothing is not a transition plan. It is an abandonment.
Functional needs assessments must be conducted by qualified clinicians with expertise in autism, not by generalist ministry workers. Families must have a meaningful right to appeal tier placements, with timelines that reflect the urgency of early childhood development.
The 5,200 children projected to lose direct funding must have a concrete, funded alternative — not a vague promise of future community services.
The ministry must engage directly with underserved communities — including South Asian, Indigenous, immigrant, and rural families — in accessible languages and formats, before implementation, not after.
Families deserve to know exactly how "functional impact" will be measured, who will conduct assessments, what training those assessors will have, and how disputes will be resolved. This information should have been released before the announcement, not after.
We founded the Sevan Childhood Foundation on the principle of Seva — selfless service — and Sarbat da Bhala — the welfare of all. We believe every child, regardless of diagnosis, background, or family income, deserves access to the support they need to thrive.
That belief does not waver. But it also does not permit us to remain silent when a policy that claims to serve all children actually serves some children less.
The families we work with — families who are already navigating cultural barriers, financial hardship, and a system that was never built with them in mind — did not ask for this upheaval.
They asked for assessments. They asked for therapy. They asked for their children to be understood.
They deserve better than a restructuring that reduces their funding, increases their paperwork, and asks them to trust a process that no one can yet fully explain.
We urge the provincial government to slow down, listen more carefully, and ensure that no child in British Columbia is left worse off in the name of a system that claims to leave no child behind.
The Sevan Childhood Foundation is a federally incorporated not-for-profit dedicated to expanding access to early autism assessments, intervention therapies, and developmental support for families in British Columbia and underserved communities. Learn more at sevanfoundation.org.
If these changes affect your family, we encourage you to contact your Member of the Legislative Assembly.
Find your MLA at: leg.bc.ca/members
You may also contact the Ministry of Children and Family Development at 1-844-442-2800 or [email protected]
For support navigating your options, reach out to us: