According to its website, the Health Professions Regulatory Advisory Council (HPRAC) “was established under the Regulated Health Professions Act, 1991 (RHPA), with a statutory duty to advise the Minister on health professions regulatory matters in Ontario.“

In February 2005, the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care asked HPRAC to advise him on various issues, including the possibility of regulating ‘psychotherapy’ – without a request from a sponsoring ‘psychotherapy’ organization.

In April 2006, the HPRAC provided the Minister its report, based on “a year of extensive consultations with health professionals, associations, regulatory colleges and hundreds of individuals“.  The report is entitled ‘Regulation of Health Professions in Ontario: New Directions’ and is shown below.

Interestingly, although HPRAC claimed to have thoroughly researched the practice of ‘psychotherapy’ in Ontario, even in their ‘What is Psychotherapy?‘ section they failed to provide their working definition of psychotherapy.   Instead they pointed towards ‘four basic psychotherapeutic orientations‘ –  also broad and undefined.

In this 2006 report, HPRAC curiously stated that “The practice of psychotherapy is distinct from both counselling, where the focus is on the provision of information, advice-giving, encouragement and instruction, and spiritual counselling, which is counselling related to religious or faith-based beliefs” (pg. 208).

This is hard to understand, since they originally said that psychotherapy was undefined.  However, by 2007, they had weaved counseling, including spiritual counseling, into the definition of psychotherapy, just as they did many other approaches to healing and wellness that they had been distinct from psychotherapy prior to the takeover plans.

By 2014, the new College was making it clear that all counseling and spiritual care had been reduced to ‘administrative’ tasks only and the ‘treatment’ aspect of counseling had to be referred to a registered psychotherapist.

In other words, an approach was morphed into a ‘profession’ practically overnight by appropriating all manner of approaches they had not previously been interested in.  That brand new profession—also conceived practically overnight–managed to finagle its way into in a position of regulating everyone who does not remotely engage in psychotherapy approaches.

Nothing in their report suggests awareness of the multiple Dictionaries of Psychology that have been examined by Stop Psychotherapy Takeover and found to contain lists of ‘psychotherapy’ approaches that include virtually every approach to healing known to humanity – including counselling!

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