Ontario sends audit of company that received millions from Skills Development Fund to police
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Ontario Premier Doug Ford (right) says he sent the OPP results of audit scrutinizing a company that received funds from the Skills Development Fund. The company, Get A-Head, has links to Labour Minister David Piccini (left).Carlos Osorio/The Canadian Press
The Doug Ford government says it has sent the Ontario Provincial Police the results of a forensic audit scrutinizing a company that received about $40-million from the province – including millions from a controversial worker-training fund.
The Office of the Premier also said the government is reviewing all payments made to the company and could take further action.
The business, called Get A-Head, offers an “AI-driven” virtual mental-health counselling platform used for students and police officers. It was acquired by a company called Keel Digital Solutions in 2022.
In a statement provided to The Globe and Mail, the company said it had not been informed of the referral to the OPP nor told of any “red flags” that emerged during the audit process.
Keel has received a series of payments over the past five years from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities and the Ministry of Health.
The company’s links to Labour Minister David Piccini have been part of the political storm over his management of the province’s $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund, which hands out cash to unions, companies and non-profits for training programs.
A lobbyist for Get A-Head and Keel, Michael Rudderham, invited Mr. Piccini to attend his wedding in Paris this fall, and has donated thousands to the PC Party. Mr. Rudderham declined to comment on Wednesday.
Earlier: Groups that got cash from Ontario training fund increasingly hired lobbyists, numbers show
Mr. Piccini also sat in a rink-side seat at a Toronto Maple Leafs’ game with Peter Zakarow, a director of Keel, in 2023, before Mr. Piccini became Labour Minister. Mr. Zakarow said in an e-mail to The Globe that he was an independent board member and has never spoken to the minister or anyone else in the government about the company. The minister has said he paid his own way for both events.
Mr. Piccini has also told a radio interviewer that his office chose to give Skills Development Fund money to the program despite the “lower-scoring” ranking it received from the civil servants that evaluated applications.
Hannah Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Premier, said in an e-mailed response to questions sent to her and to Mr. Piccini’s office that a routine audit in 2023 had “raised concerns” with what she called an “external service provider” and “identified irregularities,” prompting a “comprehensive forensic audit.”
That second audit, which Ms. Jensen said was received last week, recommended sending the results to the provincial police, something she said was done “within 24 hours.” She referred all other inquiries to the OPP.
The OPP did not provide a response to e-mailed questions by Wednesday evening.
Ahad Bandealy, Keel Digital Solution’s chief digital officer, said in an e-mailed statement that the company “co-operated fully and transparently” with the forensic audit but had “serious concerns about the process.”
He said auditors “showed persistent misunderstandings of corporate vs. not-for-profit structures and misinterpretation of tax rules,” and that Keel was “repeatedly told no irregularities or ‘red flags’ had been identified that would preclude continuing the government’s partnership with Keel.”
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Mr. Bandealy said the company has not been informed that the OPP is launching an investigation but that it will “will co-operate fully” if a probe is initiated.
“We are confident an objective review will confirm our integrity and the quality of our compliance practices,” he said, adding that it was “regrettable” that the government released information to the media before providing company executives with the findings of the audit.
Mr. Bandealy, who founded Get A-Head Inc., said Keel was awarded its initial government contract related to its postsecondary-student mental-health platform in an “open, competitive procurement” process in 2019-20. He added that the contract has been renewed several times by the province.
According to government records, Get A-Head received $32.74-million in funding from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities from 2020 to 2025, as well as $1.85-million from the Ministry of Health. It also was awarded $7.5-million in grants approved by Mr. Piccini’s office from the Skills Development Fund, starting with $2.72-million in 2024.
An initial audit conducted in 2023 would have been related to previous funding from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, not the Skills Development Fund, for which Get A-Head had only successfully applied between August and December of that year.
But even while a forensic audit was under way, Get A-Head was still cleared to receive government money. On Wednesday, Ms. Jensen, the Premier’s spokeswoman, declined to answer questions about why more government funding would have been approved after an audit had already turned up irregularities.
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The referral of the second audit to the OPP was first reported by The Trillium, a news website that focuses on Queen’s Park, on Wednesday. The outlet had also first reported Mr. Piccini’s links to Keel Digital Solutions.
The minister has been under a cloud since provincial Auditor-General Shelley Spence concluded in a report last month that the distribution of $1.3-billion in grants from the Skills Development Fund was “not fair, transparent or accountable.”
Her report says the Labour Minister’s political staff ignored evaluations by non-partisan bureaucrats and doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations with lower scores on their applications, while hundreds of higher-ranked applicants were overlooked.
Mr. Piccini has vigorously defended his ability to select applicants, saying it is needed in order to ensure government priorities are met. But his office has declined to provide a single, comprehensive list of who got money and how much and how their applications were ranked.
Ontario A-G says grant selection process for skills training program ‘not fair, transparent’
The revelation that the government sent the audit to the OPP on Wednesday prompted NDP Leader Marit Stiles to renew her calls for Mr. Ford to fire his Labour Minister, whom she called the “Minister of Favours.”
In an open letter to the Premier, she called for an end to what she described as political interference in the Skills Development Fund and said it should be administered by professional civil servants, as similar programs are in other provinces.
Liberal MPP John Fraser, the party’s leader in the legislature, also repeated his calls for the minister to quit or be fired: “If he’s still there on Monday, I am going to wonder what’s going on.”
Critics have pointed to hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund that went to recipients who hired lobbyists with close links to the government and to organizations whose leadership has donated to the PCs. Unions that have endorsed the Premier have also received cash for training programs.
A Globe analysis of the partial information provided by the government about the fund, using Ontario’s online lobbyist registry, showed that the proportion of groups that received Skills Development Fund money and hired lobbyists has shot up 60 per cent since the program was launched in 2021.
With reports from Yang Sun and Stephanie Chambers
