The Ontario government has filed a lawsuit against a company it contracted to run a student mental health program, alleging fraudulent misrepresentation and seeking to recoup more than $25 million in public money.
Ontario alleges Keel Digital Solutions, through its subsidiary Get A-Head Inc., inflated the number of counselling sessions it reported delivering to students, resulting in overpayments of millions of dollars.
The government alleges in its lawsuit that between 2022 and 2025, Keel “provided false and misleading quarterly reports of their corporate performance measures,” which were the basis for its payments.
“The false reports caused the Crown to pay the corporate defendants millions of dollars that they otherwise would not have been paid,” alleged the claim, which was filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Wednesday.
Keel Digital Solutions was closely scrutinized during the fall sitting of the legislature as one of the recipients of the Ministry of Labour’s $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund, a program the auditor general has found was not fair or transparent.
Labour Minister David Piccini came under sustained fire from opposition parties calling for his resignation, particularly since media reports say one of Keel’s lobbyists is a close friend of Piccini’s.
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NDP Leader Marit Stiles claimed in a news release that Piccini had received preferential treatment by attending a Keel lobbyist’s Paris wedding and enjoyed rinkside hockey seats with an executive from the company.
She said Ford’s government is taking the company to court “to cover his tracks” instead of taking accountability for the situation.
Liberal parliamentary leader John Fraser said the government’s lawsuit seems self-serving, given that the police are already on the matter.
“This legal action appears designed to distract from the deeper and far more troubling problems at the heart of the Skills Development Fund,” he wrote in a statement.
“Doug Ford now wants Ontarians to believe his government was swindled. They were not swindled. They were caught.”
The heat on the government has only increased after it announced it had referred the results of an audit on Keel’s funding from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities to the Ontario Provincial Police, citing concerns dating back to 2023.
Critics questioned why the Ministry of Labour gave Keel $7.5 million in skills development funding for a first responder mental health program even after an audit of their student funding had raised concerns within a different ministry.
Piccini has said Keel Digital Solutions is one of the applicants that bureaucrats had ranked low but the ministry decided to fund. He has defended the practice of granting funding to low-scoring applications, saying that’s done when they align with government priorities.
Ontario Provincial Police announced last month that they had launched an investigation into Keel’s student mental health funding.
The province alleges the company filed estimated expenses as opposed to actual expenses and “failed to report unspent funds, interest earned, and tax credits and rebates, as required by the contracts.”
Opposition parties have called for Labour Minister David Piccini to resign in relation to the Skills Development Fund controversy. (Ontario Legislative Assembly)
Get A-Head reported sessions providing counselling to people other than students as well as training mock sessions as student mental health sessions, the province alleges. It also reported the time spent by a counsellor, supervisor and student in one session as three separate sessions, the lawsuit alleges.
“(The company’s) 2022-2023 final report claimed 42,556 eligible sessions between March 31, 2022 and March 30, 2023,” the government wrote in its lawsuit.
“In actual fact, the Crown has learned that there were only 3,529 unique sessions of any duration during that period.”
The province also alleges several executives at the company “directed, facilitated, and then tried to cover-up the corporate defendants’ false reports” given to the ministry. None of the allegations have been tested in court.
The province’s lawsuit “is deeply flawed” and based on misstatements and inaccuracies, said Jay Fischbach, Keel’s chief operating officer, in an emailed statement.
He said the company has never been involved in fraudulent activity and that they expect the government to apologize and answer for the “recklessness and malice” behind the case.
Premier Doug Ford and Piccini have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and both have said they remain committed to the Skills Development Fund.
Ontario’s integrity commissioner, Cathryn Motherwell, has launched an ethics investigation into Piccini’s dealings with that fund.
Media reports have said that some beneficiaries of the fund are unions that endorsed the Progressive Conservatives in elections and people who have donated to the party.
The auditor general also found that more than 60 of the lower-scoring fund applicants were approved after they hired a lobbyist, which had the opposition crying foul over what they called preferential treatment.
The Skills Development Fund gives money to organizations for projects that help hire, train or retrain workers. The province says they’ve so far trained about 700,000 people and of those, 100,000 people found jobs within 60 days of completing the program.