Scott Stinson: Ontario calls in the police to investigate its own career-college gravy train

The scandal involving student-aid grants at Ontario’s private career colleges may have blown into the open on Tuesday, when the Doug Ford government announced that it had called in the auditor general and the Ontario Provincial Police to investigate “serious concerns” in the sector, but the juicy stuff was revealed a few days earlier.

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The Canadian Press reported on Friday, citing documents filed in court, that government inspectors found evidence of third parties completing courses at some private colleges, sometimes entire terms in a day, and some students who could not identify the name of the school they were said to be attending. Inspectors reported concerns about shared login credentials, overlapping IP addresses and “coordinated activity among users.”

The inspectors wrote that they were “unable to demonstrate that OSAP-funded students are actively participating in the programs they are enrolled in,” reported The Canadian Press, which also found through freedom-of-information requests that three private career colleges alone had received more than $219 million in government funding for about 14,800 students in a single year, 2024-25. That works out to almost $15,000 per student. (The government grants go directly to the schools.) There’s a whiff of gravy train about the whole thing.

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Unlike the broader education at most post-secondary academic institutions, career colleges are privately owned and train students for specific jobs. The court documents were part of a challenge from a small number of career colleges that were cut off from OSAP eligibility in the spring, as part of an ongoing Ontario government probe. (They deny wrongdoing, and the allegations have not been proven in court.)

Nolan Quinn, the colleges and universities minister, said on Tuesday that all OSAP funding of private career colleges will be paused as the new investigations take place, even for students who are currently in the middle of an academic year. He put out a lengthy statement that said concerns about student aid and the private post-secondary sector were first raised in late 2024, and the government began looking into the matter in early 2025.

It then “expanded the review” that year after the federal government shared information “about certain private career colleges,” Quinn’s statement said. (A dramatic rise in foreign students studying in Canada, particularly Ontario, has since caused the federal Liberals to sharply reduce their numbers.)

The Ford government earlier this year slashed the amount of student-aid grants available across the post-secondary sector, turning most of the available money into repayable loans, citing what it said were unsustainable costs. But, again, much of that growth appears to have been driven by private career colleges: yet another Canadian Press report through access-to-information found that 95 per cent of the $465-million growth in 2024-25 came from career colleges.

Just seven such colleges accounted for about $385 million in student-aid grants in that school year, equal to the amount given to all students in the public post-secondary system, CP reported.

The numbers are, in a word, staggering. And, with the caveat that so far all that anyone can say from a legal perspective is that it all looks quite fishy, the story is that the Ontario government allowed itself to shovel hundreds of millions of student-grant dollars out the door for a period of months, if not years, with what must have been vanishingly little oversight. It’s the kind of thing that would cause Doug Ford to sputter in indignation at the wastefulness of it all, except for the part where he’s the premier. It’s his government that was doing the shovelling.

His government does appear to know, at least, how bad all this looks. Consider the timing: the internal audits and compliance investigations have been going on for more than a year. The CP story with the suspicious findings from inspectors was published on Friday. The opposition Liberals called for the auditor general to be called in on Monday. And on Tuesday, Quinn announced that, lo, they had already done just that. And also the police are involved.

Both the NDP and Liberals have said that is not enough and called on Quinn to resign. They point out, not unreasonably, that the Ford PCs whacked the bulk of OSAP grants, for all post-secondary students, over what appears to have been an abuse of the system concentrated in one small area of it.

The sudden action announced Tuesday will also starve some students who were following the rules of money that they need to pay for courses in which they are already enrolled. (The government says it is looking into helping them access low-interest bank loans.)

If the legislature at Queen’s Park were not still in its super-sized summer break, it would be interesting to see how Ford would defend keeping Quinn in his job, particularly when even the government’s own timeline leaves months-long gaps when little or no action was taken on the career college file.

But the legislature isn’t sitting, so opposition MPPs don’t have the chance to ask the premier about any of it. This gives him time, if nothing else, to work up some lines about how mad it all makes him.

sstinson@postmedia.com     

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