Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome back, Mike. It's nice to have you at HESA, as always. Thank you for your leadership on this and other files as well.
We've been friends since before I ever got involved in politics and despite our small political differences, I don't know if I've ever said this in public or on the record before, but you've always been extremely encouraging. When I called you and told you that I was considering running, you encouraged me to. Knowing that I wouldn't be running with blue signs on lawns, you still encouraged me. I want to thank you for that.
The reason I called you back then was to talk about autism. I'm on your fundraising email list—not your partisan ones, but the ones that I get for the organized fundraising you do with Jaden. I've learned a lot through that and from you, including once about what “people first” terminology was all about and where we're at now, which is a little bit different from that. I really welcome that, so thank you for bringing me along and helping me learn a little bit more.
The other person in my life whom I've learned a lot from, and there are a couple—and we've talked about our speech language pathologist partners, Don and I—is Emilie. She is doing a Ph.D. on literacy and was engaged at a school board level as a speech language pathologist assessing the needs of kids with a lot of diverse needs. One of the main ones she was working on was autism. She helped me understand more fully that it's a spectrum, as has been described today. There are a lot of diverse needs within the autism community.
The other person who helped me realize that was a guy named Andrew Sabino, who's a good friend of mine in Milton. He has somewhat of a superpower as an autistic individual: He remembers everything. He worked at No Frills until recently, and he remembered every SKU. He didn't have to look up anything. It was the same when he banged on doors with me; he wouldn't have to write anything down. He'd be like, “Okay, are you ready?”, and he'd say what happened at 15 doors in a row and exactly what response he got at each door because he doesn't forget a thing.
I want to ask you a little bit about the homogeneity of how some governments treat autism supports. Obviously, Jaden and Andrew have completely different needs when it comes to how they are going to live their lives. The underpinning aspect of that—and obviously that support will be provincial—according to Emilie and other practitioners I've spoken with is that the people being assessed, and I won't just say youth but autistic individuals, tend to get much better service when they come from wealthier families because it's expensive service. The cohort of individuals she and a lot of researchers are most worried about is autistic youth who are in families from a socio-economic background that not going to be able to afford that $70,000 worth of annual support.
I'd also like to know if the $15 million in budget 2021 to develop the strategy is adequate?
That's where I'll leave it with you.