Across Ontario, thousands of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and their families are waiting for services they need to live safely and participate fully in their communities. Without proper funding dedicated to the services they need, they wait for years for assessments, therapy, supportive housing, respite and other forms of support.
For many this isn’t just a delay in service. It means months — or years — spent trying to hold things together while needs continue to grow more complex. Caregivers edge closer to burnout, health deteriorates, behaviours of concern become more difficult to manage, and opportunities for early intervention begin to slip away. The wait itself becomes part of the crisis.
For years, Ontario’s Ombudsman has been warning that this is what happens when community developmental services cannot keep pace with demand. In a 2016 investigative report titled “Nowhere to Turn”, the Ombudsman described families pushed to the brink as they searched desperately for services that were not available. Nearly a decade later “Lost in Transition,” a similar — equally damning — report echoed the same. Thousands of adults are waiting for supportive housing. Adults with IDD and their aging caregivers are dying while waiting for supports that never arrive. These reports tell a consistent story: demand continues to outpace the system’s ability to respond.
This crisis extends to children as well. According to the Ontario Autism Coalition’s Community Survey Report, 84,405 children and youth were registered for the Ontario Autism Program as of August 2025, while the program was designed to provide Core Clinical Services to only 20,000 children and youth at any one time. Approximately three-quarters of eligible children remain waitlisted for years, with many aging out of the program altogether. Early intervention loses its promise when “early” becomes years later.
Crisis within the workforce
Demand and complexity have grown, but that’s only part of the story. The sector depends on the labour of highly-skilled professionals — behaviour analysts, nurses, occupational therapists, direct support professionals, parent coaches, psychologists, speech-language pathologists, social workers, and others. This expertise takes years of education, mentorship, experience, all of which are getting more expensive, in an ever-taxing world.
Direct support professionals are the backbone of the sector. They are predominantly Black, South Asian, Filipino and Caribbean women. These professionals provide intimate, skilled and emotionally-demanding support but their labour is systematically devalued within a legacy of expectations of care work, racialized labour segmentation, and policy frameworks that treat community developmental services as peripheral, not crucial.
We are writing this as professionals who are currently participating in the Worth Fighting For campaign, a province-wide Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) strike involving thousands of community health and social services workers. The strike has brought renewed attention to longstanding concerns about funding, compensation, and staffing in the sector. But these problems did not begin with the strike, and they will not disappear when it ends.
The crisis moves downstream
Many publicly-funded developmental service agencies are struggling with recruitment and retention. Experienced clinicians are retiring or leaving for better-paying opportunities in other sectors. Additionally, several agencies have carried out rounds of layoffs of frontline staff even as demand for service continues to grow. The consequences of these pressures do not remain within agency walls. They are passed to frontline workers and, ultimately, to the individuals and families those workers are trying to support.
OPSEU’s recent Open the Books report describes concerns that many professionals have been raising for years: increasing vacancies, recruitment challenges, difficulty retaining experienced staff, and growing concerns about the sustainability of Ontario’s community developmental services workforce.
Bill 124 also left a lasting mark on the sector. While years of chronic underinvestment and rising demand predated the legislation, wage restraint during a period of significant inflation made recruitment and retention even more difficult. Despite the repeal of Bill 124, the community developmental services sector was excluded from a funding remedy to support wages that keep up with the rising costs of living. The Ontario government denies its part in this crisis and insists that the issue be addressed through collective bargaining with individual agencies, while the agencies themselves indicate that annual budgets remain stagnant and there is no funding available to correct the wage cap for frontline staff.
When crisis arrives before support
The costs of waiting are measured not only in dollars, but in lost opportunities, the decline of well-being for children and adults across the province, and preventable crises affecting our most vulnerable. Crises often result in greater use of emergency departments, hospitals, police services, and other systems that were never intended to replace comprehensive community care. Community developmental services were designed to prevent those crises–not simply respond to them after they occur.
Ontario cannot solve this problem by continuing to add people to waitlists and hoping capacity catches up. Sustained investment in community developmental services is needed, a workforce strategy that makes these careers sustainable, and a meaningful plan to address the thousands already waiting. When people have to reach a crisis before they can access the support that they need in the first place, the waitlist is no longer a measure of demand, it has become part of the crisis itself.
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