Paul Gauthier
This page records what public sources support about a named person. It is not a life history. Role statements stay in the sections below. Please do not contact people named in this archive, or their families or colleagues, without a separately agreed research protocol.
Documented role
The Governor General Order of Canada citation (awarded 11 May 2023; invested 12 December 2024) calls him “Initiator of British Columbia’s Choice in Supports for Independent Living” and co-founder of the Individualized Funding Resource Centre Society. That is an official honour citation. It is not a ministry design file, and it does not date CSIL.
No 1993–95 Ministry of Health document in this catalogue that we have read names him.
Formal CSIL design-group membership is not inferred from the honour citation or from later founder language.
Later accounts
Later Individualized Funding Resource Centre (IFRC) materials attributed to Gauthier, or describing him, disagree on the start year and use founder language:
- 2014 SCI slides: CSIL “established” in 1993; “The Pilot — 50 people tried it out”; Gauthier labelled “Founder of CSIL”; “Pre CSIL?” list includes ECPM.
- 2015 Module 1: the same “established” sentence with 1994; labelled “the founder of the CSIL program.”
- IFRC Our Team: “one of the founders”; “started on the CSIL program in 1994.”
Those are later attributions, not 1990s records we have read. The 1993/1994 conflict is preserved on the CSIL design and pilot chapter. ECPM naming in the 2014 deck is a later account, not a document that proves official succession (ECPM chapter).
Unresolved
- What “initiator” / “founder” refers to in 1993–95 files from the time (design, advocacy, pilot participation, or later summary).
- How his role relates to Joseph Theriault and ECPM as described on the IFRC page.
- Whether he appears on the unread 1990 ECPM manual title page (not inferred).