“Helping kids with disabilities is never bad, but we can’t leave FASD kids behind again”
Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 – SURREY – After carefully analyzing the Surrey First announcement on support for autistic children in community facilities, Proudly Surrey has added a key plank to its platform. “While we feel we have been the party with ideas throughout this campaign,” stated council candidate Stuart Parker, noting that Safe Surrey has adopted his party’s RCMP policy, Surrey First has adopted its policy on recreation centre fees and Surrey Integrity Now adopted, then paused, its LRT policy, “we are not the only ones out there with ideas. As much as we think it is important to insert new ideas into the debate, we also think it is important to adopt and improve on other parties’ policies and Surrey First’s policy on youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities is certainly such a policy.”
School trustee candidate Dean McGee, a parent of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities explained, “Unfortunately, mixed into the desire to help children is a problematic class politics that we see repeated in Surrey First’s announcement. While some children with disabilities will benefit from this policy, others will not because children diagnosed in the autism spectrum receive nearly a hundred times as much per capita funding from government and the non-profit sector as children diagnosed in the fetal alcohol spectrum. I can tell you firsthand that the situation is so bad that parents whose children’s disabilities are traced to fetal alcohol exposure often continue pursuing additional diagnosis in the hopes of an additional autism diagnosis to get the necessary help.”
“As a social scientist,” Parker added, “I can tell you that the problem goes even deeper than that: kids with FASD from high-income families are too often misdiagnosed with autism, while kids from low-income families and racialized groups, especially indigenous kids, who have autism are mistakenly diagnosed with FASD. There is an ugly politics of class, race and stigma that imagines the children of working people suffering from parent-inflicted disabilities and less meriting of government help and the children of wealthy people suffering from idiopathic disabilities that are nobody’s fault.”
Over 1000 Surrey Youth in FASD Spectrum, Over 1500 in Autism Spectrum
Of the approximately 110,000 Surrey residents under the age of nineteen, roughly 1670 are in the autism spectrum and 1100 suffer from a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. “If we are going to be training new youth workers, redesigning programs and all the other excellent activities that Surrey First laid out in their policy announcement on September 18th, let us make sure that these workers and programs work just as well for kids with the second-most prevalent neurodevelopmental disability in Canada and the most prevalent in the world. Let’s make sure we have resources from which low-income and racialized families are as likely to benefit as higher-income, whiter families do,” Parker stated. “We commend Tom Gill and his party for starting this conversation but let’s not let it end here.”