An estimated 20,000 Alberta kids face waiting years to get therapy for disabilities

This is Part 1 of CBC Calgary’s coverage of the growing waitlist for kids with disabilities.

An estimated 20,000 children are stuck on Alberta’s Family Support for Children with Disabilities (FSCD) waiting list, facing years of delays to get speech, behavioural and other treatment or therapy for autism and various disabilities.

Caseworkers within the provincial government gave those numbers to their union and said many of these children have already been deemed eligible — some have even signed initial contracts — but they can’t access funding for treatment until Alberta assigns a caseworker, and the limited number of provincial staff are maxed out.

It means families are waiting three or more years for help, said Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) president Sandra Azocar, sharing what the caseworkers told her.

Alberta’s support system for children with disabilities is meant to cover some of the "extraordinary costs” of raising a child who needs frequent trips to the hospital, specialized support to attend daycare and therapy to, for example, learn to speak, use the toilet or to visit a grocery store without a meltdown.

To understand the system, CBC News requested parents' input in May and June. More than 700 parents responded.

Many parents of children already in the program said they see real improvements in the way their children cope with life. Some even shared how kids were now able to attend regular school programs because of the help they got early on.

But parents on the waiting list expressed despair. Many said that as they wait, their kids are getting kicked out of daycare and schools. They’re losing their jobs, taking on debt to pay for therapy, and sometimes seeing kids regress when they run out of money.

Many of them said they’re floundering.

“Burnout and everything that goes with it. … I have cried many days, needed my mental health medication increased as well. Our family is struggling to survive and we need help,” wrote a woman from northwest Alberta, who applied in 2025.

“Exhausting, soul crushing. We are working so hard to learn all we can to best support our child, but social media/reading books is not the same as working with real professionals,” wrote one parent from Calgary, who applied in 2024.

“I was diagnosed with cancer … I have had to put off my treatments until I am able to get respite care,” wrote an Edmonton woman, who applied in 2025.

When CBC News followed up by phone, that last woman, Chelsea Brown, said she even contacted her MLA for help accessing FSCD, with no luck. Without a specialized respite worker for her three-year-old autistic son, she can’t stay in the hospital, as required for her radioactive iodine treatment. She showed CBC her medical records, and said her doctors are simply monitoring the nodes in her thyroid instead.

“I’ve heard nothing back from FSCD,” she said. “It’s so frustrating.”

CBC News sought feedback on FSCD following our work on classroom complexity, where teachers said they see more kids who aren’t ready for school and more families in crisis.

We collaborated with Hold My Hand Alberta (a Facebook support group for parents) and the advocacy group Inclusion Alberta to share the feedback form with families.

More than 300 respondents said they were still waiting for child-specific therapy after applying in 2023 or 2024, and more still said they applied for help in 2025 or 2026.

In contrast, families who said they applied in the 2010s reported waiting a couple of months.

Azocar said the program now gets 500 new applications per month, and funding has not kept pace with population growth. She said that’s hard on her members, many of whom have caseloads of 120 to 150 clients — higher than recommended.

“A lot of our members work with moral distress, because they know the damage this wait has on children,” she said.

“The majority of [families] are getting their approval letter. But the files just sit there, because you can't access services until you get assigned a caseworker, and caseworkers are not assigned to families for three or four years, and in some cases for five years.”

In 2022, the Government of Alberta stopped publishing data on the number of people waiting for services.

When CBC News contacted the press secretary for Assisted Living and Social Services and the premier’s office to ask about the waitlist, they did not respond to the question.

In a statement, press secretary Amber Edgerton wrote: “The complexity of client needs is increasing, as well as the costs of the services required to support them. That's why Budget 2026 provides $271 million for FSCD.”

Edgerton said the ministry is “reviewing the program to ensure effective support for families in need, now and into the future.”

Annual reports from the ministry show there are 18,584 active cases open with the department in 2026, down from 20,033 active cases two years ago, despite a $44-million increase in the budget.

At an Alberta Municipalities roundtable in March, then-Social Services minister Jason Nixon answered a question about the FSCD waitlist, blaming the wait on people moving to the province in search of services.

Nixon said they’re reviewing the program to co-ordinate with the school system and refine its focus.

“FSCD is really struggling; there’s no doubt about it,” Nixon said. “It’s going to have to be a program that has some level of triage to it. The reality is the government is not going to be in a spot to be able to pay the bill for everything; it’s just not.”

The problem with FSCD is big enough that other organizations are also calling for transparency and improvement.

Last year’s Aggression and Complexity in Schools Action Team report called on the government to “address urgent needs by increasing FSCD and related supports to reduce wait times.”

Alberta’s Child and Youth Advocate also called on the government to improve FSCD and increase access to emergency help. In her special report on young people with disabilities in provincial care, she found the lack of timely support led to family breakdown and more children in care.

And a spokesperson for the Alberta Medical Association said its pediatrics section recently assembled an advisory group to develop recommendations for the province to strengthen the FSCD.

Trish Bowman, head of Inclusion Alberta, said the program started in 2004, in part to prevent children from unnecessarily being taken into provincial care, and was the first of its kind in Canada.

“Alberta really did invest, and it saw it as an investment, not as a handout,” she said.

She says it’s unclear why this has become less of a priority, but it might be tied to an increase in individualism in Alberta culture or a sense that caring for people with disabilities is woke or too left-wing.

“There’s this idea that people are either taking advantage of or relying too much on the system … that people should just take care of themselves.”

At the legislature, New Democrat MLA Marie Renaud said now she spends about a third of her time trying to help families get answers on their FSCD applications. Before she was elected, Renaud was executive director of the LoSeCa Foundation, which supports adults with disabilities.

She worries the impact of the delay in treatment is far larger than this government recognizes.

“I mean, it's not a coincidence that we're seeing more complexity in the classroom. When kids aren't getting that early intervention, they're not ready,” she said.

“If [the UCP] did even a week of true consultation, they would hear from families about the economic pressure. The families are collapsing. Kids are doing horribly in school; they risk losing daycare placements; people have lost jobs already,” she said. “The impact is huge and it's just going to grow, and then they're going to need more supports as adults.”