Welcome to my blog.
It is always a work in progress (as are we all).
If you value and/or have benefited from the work of psychologists or know someone who has,
please help us to preserve our standards of psychological services in Ontario.
See below for details about the situation and what you can do to help.
A Call to Action:
Maintaining Standards for High Quality
Psychology Services in Ontario
In this post, you will learn about:
the regulatory college (the College of Psychologists and Behaviour Analysts of Ontario; CPBAO) and its role
the issue (pressure for change, lack of access) leading to proposed weakening of standards (reduced training and licensing exams)
the potential risks of lowered standards
current psychology training expectations
the contrast between current standards and proposed lower standards
comparisons to other professions
what you can do to help
with contacts for MPPs, the regulatory college (CPBAO), and social media advocacy accounts
What is a Regulatory College?
A regulatory college
works to ensure the protection of the public by regulating professionals within the field it oversees
sets the standards for education, experience, and examinations to become a professional member
vets applicants to ensure members are capable of providing the services they provide to the public
receives and resolves complaints made about members (e.g., when services may have been delivered in a manner that harms clients)
can recommend retraining or removal of licensing
ensures continuing education standards.
The CPBAO is composed of members of the public and members of the profession (see here for current council members).
Why is the Psychology Regulatory College Making Changes?
The college is under pressure to make changes:
1) to be included in “as of right” legislation (for inter-provincial mobility of goods and services), which aims
to allow mobility of professionals between provinces, including those who do not have the same standards of education and licensing requirements
to create more access to psychologists without increasing public funding of quality services
2) The Office of the Fairness Commissioner, which
wants the profession to be more accessible to marginalized individuals who have traditionally been shut out of pursuing advanced (e.g., doctoral) graduate degrees
Note: In recognition of biases, in recent years the Canadian Psychological Association (a body that makes accreditation standards across Canada) and various educational institutions have taken action to ensure graduate programs better reflect the diversity of the Canadian public. Training takes time but substantially more psychology practitioners from diverse backgrounds are being trained currently than ever before.
In the absence of making such changes, the college has been informed it could be placed under a supervisor and possibly dissolved if the ‘independent’ regulatory college of psychology does not make changes.
Misdirection: Lack of Access Due to Lack of Funding
For decades, Ontarians could be confident psychology practitioners registered with the CPBAO would provide high quality therapy and assessment services. Our psychology practitioners develop and hone skills through years of education and supervised services. The CPBAO’s proposed changes threaten to destroy the training and licensing processes that help to make sure psychological services are delivered ethically and competently.
Many people can wait months, and even years, to receive publicly-funded psychological services, particularly for services for children. Waitlists sometimes exist in private psychological practices, but they tend to be much shorter. Unfortunately, services as private practices are paid for by clients and only reimbursed if clients have private insurance coverage. Psychologists and psychological associates rigorously trained to (a) provide care to those with severe or very complex mental health concerns (e.g., multiple co-occurring conditions, personality disorders, reality-testing concerns, such as psychosis) and (b) diagnosis of mental health conditions. While there is not a shortage of psychotherapy providers (the College of Psychotherapists in Ontario regulates various professionals who can provide therapy), there is a shortage of affordable options for psychological diagnostic (assessment) services.
“access issues stem from a lack of funding for training competent psychology professionals and a lack of public funding for psychological services”
Low access to psychological care is not due to red tape from our regulatory body. Rather, access issues stem from a lack of funding for training competent psychology professionals and lack of public funding for psychological services. Assessments by psychologists or psychological associates are generally not well funded in hospitals and few are available in schools. For example, at one high school where I completed a training rotation, only 5 assessments were allotted across the entire student body of 2000+ students. Additionally, many exceptional candidates for graduate studies in clinical psychology are rejected due to a lack of funding to train them.
As a profession we agree there are not enough psychology practitioners in Ontario. This is not a problem unique to Ontario. Even those provinces that have a much lower standard for entry into the profession, there is limited access to psychological care. Ask an Albertan who has struggled with mental health or whose child has struggled; they will tell you it was next to impossible to find a psychologist in the public sector and it was challenging to find one in the private sector as well.
There are more practical and less radical and risky solutions than lowering standards—solutions that will maintain the standard of care while increasing access. Across Canada,
we need change in coverage of services so more people can access high quality psychological care.
Psychology services should not just be for people with private insurance or larger incomes. Like changes made to increase access to dental services, more funding for lower income individuals could provide greater access. We need more federal and provincial funding to support more psychology positions in hospitals, community clinics, and schools so private care is not the only option for people and their families.
we need standardization regarding the training and experience that is considered acceptable for entry into the profession.
Consistency in standards across provinces and across countries (e.g., United States), like in the medical profession, will create common understanding of and expectations around psychological services.
Eroding the standard will create further variability within the profession and confusion for the public.
What will the term “psychologist” mean if all practitioners have such varied training and education?
The bar for working with people who may be at their most vulnerable should not be so low that it can be tripped over.
we need increased investments in training, both federally and provincially.
We need to train more students to become highly competent practitioners who can meet the growing mental health needs of the population.
Chronic underfunding and limited resources in post-secondary programs mean we exclude excellent graduate applicants because of an insufficient number of seats in grad school.
Most graduate studies programs can only accept 3-6% of applicants to clinical psychology programs (compared to an acceptance rate as high as 18% of medical school applicants).
we need to help the public navigate access.
many private practitioners do not have lengthy waitlists for diagnostic services (although waitlists can be longer for child-focused services).
There are insufficient public channels for services and there is no public directory that helps clients access appropriate private services
Many clients who find their way to a psychology clinic express frustration about navigating who does what. Frequently my clients ask, “What is the difference between a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychological associate, a social worker, and a psychotherapist?”
This confusion will increase if our standards are eroded: There will be limited experiential and educational differences between psychotherapists and those who can register as psychologists at the master’s level without completing rigorous licensing examinations and all of the thousands of hours of hands-on learning and skill development under supervision.
Clients will now not even know to ask, what is the difference between a master’s level psychologist (under the new proposed standards), a psychologist previously known as a psychological associate, and a doctoral psychologist? They will think all psychologists and psychologist-provided services are created equally—and, that will be far from correct
The bottom line:
We need to train more talented people at a consistently higher standard,
to fund more access,
and to help the public navigate accessing services.
Shortcuts with education and supervision are not solutions.
Lower standards will NOT:
create more psychologists who are equally capable of providing rigorously high quality services to the clients who trust them to help
create more access to lower-cost services
Lower standards will RISK:
the competency of the profession (less training and education for new graduates entering the profession) and will undermine the public trust
access to the public by removing access to thousands of hours of supervised training services provided for years by each trainee and often at much lower fees
misdiagnosis and missed diagnoses
access to appropriate treatments (medication, therapy) and other supports (accommodation), potentially causing more harm than help
inaccurate assessment and evaluations of risk in forensic settings
degree-mill virtual-only graduate schools churning out masses of poorly trained practitioners who do not know what they do not know
greater potential exploitation of marginalized practitioners. Corporations will take advantage of the flood of newly minted and less trained clinicians. Without structural change to training and funding, changes to licensing will not make more marginalized people pursue advanced doctoral degrees—they will still be more likely to end education at the master’s level.
Current Psychology Training Standards: From Personal Experience
In my first training placement, I worked with seniors assessing possible dementia and providing therapy in long-term care homes. In my time at that placement I could not learn nearly as much as was needed to practice independently. And, yet, my first practicum was nearly 200 more hours of supervised training than the 300 hours that will be required for new master’s-level grads to apply for supervised practice as a psychologist. After completing my first practicum, I could not fathom being ready to practice as a psychologist with such little, narrowly-focused experience. This was the same for each member of my graduate class.
Instead, of hanging a shingle in the quickest way possible, I completed hundreds of hours more supervised clinical work across three different practicum settings and worked as a psychometrist before I completed a one-year residency of over 2000 more hours. These experiences gave me further breadth and depth of training and experience, with children, adolescents, adults, and seniors who had a range of complex mental health needs and physical health conditions—they taught me essential skills, including how to recognize the limits of my skills and knowledge. Then I registered for supervised practice with the CPBAO and completed yet another 2000+ hours of supervised clinical work.
My first training placement focused solely on work with older individuals, with dementia, health concerns, and acquired brain injury. I did not see children, adolescents, young or middle-aged adults. I did not work with clients struggling with ADHD, learning disorders, depression, anxiety, OCD, trauma, etc.
But, under the proposed changes to the college standards, it is not clear whether a substantial lack of experience would matter for newly minted master’s program graduates. Under the proposed changes, new grads could still apply to register with the college and work with any and all of these populations.
In just one year of supervised practice, new master’s level grads with fewer hours of hands-on training than I had in my first practicum, could determine whether they wanted to work with any age group with any mental health conditions—all without the college (through lengthy supervision, vetting of competency areas, and the oral exam) providing any particular oversight about their scope of practice and skill.
Supervised Training Has Multiple Benefits
skill and knowledge development in trainees
maximizing output with checks and balances on quality
access to low-cost care
Each supervisor gives 1-2 hours of their time weekly to each trainee so trainees can see many more clients (and at reduced rates) than the supervisors would have been able to see in those 1-2 hours of their time. Simultaneously, because supervisors have overall responsibility for the clients trainees see under their supervision, they ensured trainees are delivering services competently. The skills and knowledge of trainees grow from exposure to multiple supervisors with different approaches and theoretical lenses. Trainees gain hands-on experience with a range of clients, helping them to guide their chosen areas of practice (and determine areas of practice that were outside of their scope of abilities).
While working as a trainee, supervisees put in thousands of hours of work in clinical settings. They deliver services at a reduced rate and filling in gaps in healthcare at longterm care homes, hospitals, schools, and community mental health clinics. The years psychology trainees spend in supervised clinical work is not idle time that prevents Ontarians from accessing care: Supervised training improves access to care at a low cost to clients and governments. Lowering standards for training threatens access to these services.
The Costs:
Removing requirements for thousands of hours of supervised services
will reduce the quality, breadth, and depth
of training psychologists receive
AND
will severely reduce access to lower fee services.
From the Backdoor to the Front Door: A Loophole in the Law
As-of-right legislation for inter-provincial mobility within the profession is not new. For years, our college has acknowledged the loophole in the legislation that permits transferring of titles across provinces. For that reason, some individuals who would not be able to register with the title of ‘psychologist’ in Ontario, because they did not meet the educational and training standards currently maintained by the college, were able to register in another province (e.g., Alberta) with a master’s-level requirement and complete one year of supervised practice. Once registered as a psychologist in another province/territory, those individuals have been able to move to Ontario and use the protected designation of ‘psychologist’ in Ontario—without undergoing the rigorous 4 years of supervised work experience our current master’s-level psychological associates complete before applying to be in supervised practice for one more year.
The college is proposing that what once was considered a loophole should be the standard—a loophole in the law that allowed less trained clinicians to be designated as psychologists will become the minimum threshold for entry into the profession of psychology in Ontario. When colleges in other provinces are advancing their protections and standards, requiring more training and education of their practitioners, Ontario will be moving backward. This is a move that has the potential to create more (not fewer) loophole problems for other provinces (Ontario’s proposed lowered standards will be used by practitioners to try to enter other provinces).
Until Now, Why Did Master’s-level Practitioners Need 4 Years of Post-Grad Work Experience in Ontario?
Master’s-level practitioners and doctoral-level practitioners do the same work and have the same responsibilities. We have the responsibility to provide high quality therapy, supervision, and assessment, which comes with the privilege of communicating mental health diagnoses—a privilege that is restricted to very few professions (e.g., physicians, psychiatry, psychology).
Both master’s-level clinicians and doctoral clinicians have to complete one year of supervised work while registered with the college, during which time they are seeing clients and consolidating learning through studying for three licensing exams. Before getting to the point of registration with the college, there are currently multiple other steps in training for both master’s level and doctoral-level practitioners:
Doctoral Level
at least 4 practica placements totalling about 1500-3000 hours of supervised clinical work
2 additional years of advanced clinical-focused coursework
one-year full-time (1800-2000 hours) clinical residency
Current Master’s Level Training
At least two practica (700-900 hours) during their degree
4 years of supervised work experience
This work-experience route ensures master’s-level clinicians have the opportunity, while closely supervised, to expand their clinical experience, knowledge, and skills. In place of the additional practica, course-based learning, and clinical residency completed by doctoral practitioners, the 4 years of supervised work experience for master’s level clinicians has been a “hands-on” apprenticeship-like pathway to obtaining the same level of learning and skill development that doctoral psychology practitioners gain. This process for psychological associates produces extremely capable practitioners.
The Proposed Changes:
1) Proposed Reduced Standards for Master’s-Level Training:
minimum of just 300 hours of supervised work, in only one setting during graduate studies
no required post-degree supervised work experience before registering for one-year of supervised practice
AND
2) Eliminating or Fundamentally Changing Examinations for All Psychology Practitioners:
Regardless of degree, exams testing knowledge, ethics, and competency have traditionally been required. It is important to demonstrate knowledge of ethics and the laws (federal and provincial) relevant to Ontarians. It is also important to demonstrate knowledge of the very practices people intend to engage in once they are no longer under supervision. At the oral exam, clinicians must demonstrate knowledge of what they claim to know and intend to do for practice as well as knowledge of their limits (explicitly sharing about the types of work they know they do not have sufficient breadth or depth of knowledge and experience to address without seeking additional supervision and/or consultation).
The only exam that the college has chosen to maintain has poor predictive validity for the field, is so broad-based that much of it is not applicable/relevant to the work most clinicians will be doing (e.g., industrial organization), tests foundational knowledge that many years of post-secondary courses have covered (our transcripts are likely a sufficient stand in for this evaluation), and has a pass/fail rate that suggests bias with respect to minorities. Lastly, Alberta, whom the Ontario college of psychologists has inexplicably chosen as a model upon which to base these proposed changes, has even argued that unlimited attempts to pass the test should no longer be permitted.
Current Exams:
broad-based knowledge exam, four attempts to pass permitted
ethics and province-specific law exam (pass/fail, repeats permitted twice yearly)
oral exam focused on competence in assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning, and ethics
Proposed Changes:
broad-based knowledge exam but with unlimited attempts (unlimited attempts is not permitted by other provinces)
e-learning ethics module (no fail, not high stakes)
no oral exam to ensure competence
Removal of Declared (and Vetted) Competency Areas:
No more oversight and registration for specialty areas. No minimums explicitly required to demonstrate specialized knowledge of highly specialized practice areas. Without any vetting by other psychology professionals in the relevant specialty practice areas, practitioners will now be the sole determiners of their practice areas for clinical, neuro, health, counselling, forensic, rehab, (etc.) psychology. They will also self-declare what populations they feel fit to serve (children, adolescents, adults, seniors, couples, families) but will not have to demonstrate knowledge or experience to back up that declaration. Without the oral exam, clinicians will also not be asked to identify conditions and client populations they are not competently able to work with.
The problem with simultaneously reducing supervised work experience and eliminating the licensing exam guard rails is that poorly trained clinicians tend do not know what they don’t know. Less trained individuals (in various fields) are more likely to overestimate their capabilities (aka the Dunning-Kruger effect).
National and International Standards: What About Other Provinces (and States)?
There is no national standard for what makes a psychologist. There is an accreditation body (Canadian Psychological Association) that determines whether training programs meet criteria for breadth and depth of education, but there is no standard minimum for education and supervised experience across Canada. Ontario has long been the province with the highest standards for entry into the profession of psychology.
The college’s proposal includes too much change all at once: Lowering practicum and post-degree supervised experience, removing the oral (competency) exam, and removing the ethics/jurisprudence exam. There are certainly some incremental changes that could be made to reduce barriers in a manner that also reduces potential risk to the public. At the least, maintaining examinations for new registrants would have provided the very data the college says is lacking: What is the proof that lower levels of training led to less knowledgable and competent practitioners? With an ethics exam and oral competency exam still in place, we would have the opportunity to determine that (e.g., inferred from simple comparisons of pass/fail rates of our current rigorously trained master’s level psychological associates and the new crop of master’s level graduates who will have less experience).
In contrast to Ontario, which is trying to mirror the lowest provincial standard, some other provinces are seeking to increase their standards (e.g., Nova Scotia) or uphold their already stringent (e.g., Québec) minimum standards for entry into the profession of psychology. In recognition of potential harm, even Alberta’s college is not keeping its own low standards: It has proposed to put limits on the number of failed attempts for its licensing exam.
In the U.S., nearly all (except about 6) states set the minimum entry into the profession as a psychologist at the Ph.D. level. See APA’s statement here. But the issue in Ontario is not a question of master’s-level vs. Ph.D.-level clinicians: Rather, it is a matter of the quality of services provided by a very well-trained master’s-level clinicians like Ontario has now and the much less trained master’s-level clinicians the college is proposing to allow in to the profession in two months if we take no action now.
Mental Health is Health: Why do We Treat it as Less Than?
Imagine cutting the training for any other licensed profession to less than half of what they currently do while also removing licensing exam safeguards that ensure knowledge and skill.
Would you see a physician with half their current required training, with no data (exams) to support that they are just as capable?
Would you let a surgeon operate on you independently if they had half their hands-on training experience?
Would you live in a high-rise building designed by an engineer who had less than half of the training and just one (instead of four) co-op experiences?
There would be an uproar if physicians, surgeons, and engineers required less training.
I chose this educational path because I felt then (and still believe now) that I owed it to the most vulnerable of my clients to be the best trained clinician I could be. I stayed in Ontario after residency, in part because of the seriousness with which the Ontario college of psychologists approached regulation of entry into the profession. Like most people, clinicians want to work with colleagues who are competent, with those whose skills and knowledge we can reasonably trust by the very nature of them becoming a member of the college. Since the college’s decision on September 26, 2025 to lower training and standards, the question of whether to stay in a province where these skills are not valued has arisen many times amongst members of the college. I want to stay and fight for all Ontarians to have access to quality care. But who will want to stay if these changes go through and the profession is degraded? Who will stay if the job of our current rigorously trained practitioners will be to address the crises (e.g., misdiagnosed, inappropriately treated and accommodated clients) created by those who are not as capably trained? Current practitioners with higher levels of training may leave the province or retire early as a result of these changes, and this will further reduce options for high quality care for Ontarians.
Boiled Down:
Psychological services will not get better or more accessible by making required training less.
Lowering training will reduce access to lower-cost supervised services.
Lowering training will produce lower quality services, opening doors for diagnostic services to be delivered through lower-cost assessment-mill-style corporations.
Lowering training will produce lower quality services in private practices with fees that will still be too costly to those who can’t afford private care.
These lower-quality private-pay services may also be more costly in terms of risk to those who can afford them.
Highly skilled clinicians may leave the province or retire early. Who wants to work where your skills are not valued?
What Can You Do?
Tell your MPP you do not support lower quality care that comes with lower access (less low-cost supervised services) and more risk of harm. The CPBAO has proposed potentially harmful changes. Whether intentional or not, inclusion in ‘as of right’ legislation does not acknowledge the true barriers to accessing mental health services in Ontario. Our regulatory college for psychologists and your MPPs need to know that Ontarians care about access to quality services. Tell your MPP you want the government to push back against the college of psychologists’ proposed changes. Tell them you want real change to support mental health in Ontario by funding training and services in your communities and schools.
Write the CPBAO to tell them you do not support changes to the standards for training and licensing. Psychologists should meet a high bar to show they are competent because the stakes are high.
Find your MPP and send them a letter sharing your concerns (a templated letter* will also be available in the coming days)
Contact the regulatory college (CPBAO): quality assurance by email and snail mail and send them a letter sharing your concerns (a templated letter* will also be available in the coming days)
(*work in progress, will update soon)
As a profession, we are in the early stages of mobilization. We have just 60 days of public consultation before the CPBAO’s proposed changes could be signed into law by the provincial government’s Minister of Health.
Please follow our psychology advocacy efforts on socials (these accounts will become more active in the coming weeks):
Psychology Ontario Advocacy Facebook page
Instagram: @PsychologyOntarioAdvocacy
TikTok: psych_ontario_advocacy
Elsewhere in the Media: Articles that Describe the Situation