When Sharon Hope Irwin was running a daycare centre in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, in the 1970s, a woman asked her to enrol her severely autistic child. The boy screamed and ran around without apparent provocation. "It was obvious to us that we couldn't take care of him," says Sharon. But the mother begged for him to be included, saying that she would lose her job otherwise.

Sharon didn't have the heart to say No. She went to social services and successfully argued for an extra pair of hands at the daycare – not a person with specialized skills, just someone who could offer much more individual attention to the child. The arrangement worked. In fact, the experience made the caregivers realize that it would be good for each of the children to get a little one-on-one attention, which turned out to be an improvement for everyone. By the time a specially created special-needs facility which could take the autistic boy opened at the end of the year, no one wanted him to leave.

So began Sharon Hope Irwin's long and illustrious career in the service of children with special needs. But she doesn't single herself out – hers is, in fact, a rather common story, she says. "Many of the child care centres which exemplify best practices in the care of children with special needs started simply because someone didn't have the heart to say No."

This makes the growing body of expertise about children with special needs a double-edged sword. Since the 1970s, training manuals and policy papers on children with special needs have proliferated. There has been national and international recognition of the issue. "There has been an increase in expectations," says Hope Irwin.

But paradoxically, there has been a decrease in actual capacity in many places. While some have moved further towards inclusion, many have backed away. The primary reason for this, says Hope Irwin, is that special needs programs are built on regular child care – which is itself suffering from demoralization and a lack of resources. A boost in funding to quality child care would be the first requisite in a strategy of inclusion.

Janice Douglas of the Canadian Association for Community Living (CACL) wholeheartedly agrees. Douglas debunks the belief that special needs children are necessarily "an add-on" requiring specialized staff. "If you have high-quality staff, then in many cases you should be able to create inclusive practices without bringing in extra staff," she says. True inclusion is more likely without specialized staff, she says, because it can single out the child, setting them apart from their peers.

Meanwhile, parents of disabled children struggle to find appropriate care for their children. "What child care?" asks Laurie Miller, a child care activist in rural Ontario. As the mother of a severely disabled child, she has heard the whole litany of excuses for her child's exclusion – including some very paradoxical ones. "They talk about integration and inclusion as reasons for not allowing special needs children in!"

She now drives from Renfrew to the neighbouring town of Ogdensburg, 20 minutes away, for her child care. It's not that the Ogdensburg facility has any special programs, she says, it's simply that they were willing to take her child.

Hope Irwin says this sort of situation reminds her of the civil rights struggles in the South. "Nowadays, you don't hear ‘my black child can't get in,' but you do hear ‘my disabled child can't get in.' " She compares the brave black parents who sent their kids to "white" schools to parents who push to have their special needs children included. "If you admit a child, people will seek out the necessary resources," she says. Even if those resources are not the ideal ones, inclusion will be much better than exclusion – for both the parent and the child.

Parents of children with disabilities already face enough problems without having to struggle with a lack of child care, says Hope Irwin. "Some people say the quickest way to become poor is to have a child with a disability."

But like race, disability is one of those issues that keeps getting shuffled on and off the public agenda. In the Multilateral Framework on Early Learning and Child Care signed just over one year ago, "inclusivity" was one of the five principles agreed to by the provinces, territories, and federal government. In this year's Liberal Party platform, however, that principle had again slipped off, says Hope Irwin.

She and other special needs advocates are pushing to ensure that the "quad" principles of "quality, universality, affordability and developmental" are expanded back out into a "quint" principle with the addition of "inclusivity."

"Quality is the cornerstone, without which there cannot be inclusion, but it is not in itself sufficient," says Janice Douglas of the CACL.

Hope Irwin sees this issue through the perspective of many years of struggle in the movement for child care in Canada. "People who have watched the whittling away of child care are concerned that children with disabilities will be at the bottom of the heap of priorities unless that principle is explicitly included," she says.

The autistic boy Hope Irwin first admitted into her child care has now grown into a responsible young man who holds down a steady job. He lives in one of the supportive group homes in her community. She also recently celebrated the university admission of one of her former child care students who has Cerebral Palsy. He is the first student with such a degree of disability to be admitted to the university, she says. So she will continue to speak out to ensure that inclusivity is at the core, rather than the periphery, of any new child care policy in Canada.

Canadian Council on Social Development, 190 O'Connor Street, Suite 100, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 2R3