{"id":375269,"date":"2025-11-13T05:45:17","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T05:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/375269\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T05:45:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T05:45:17","slug":"ontario-sends-audit-of-company-that-received-millions-from-skills-development-fund-to-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/375269\/","title":{"rendered":"Ontario sends audit of company that received millions from Skills Development Fund to police"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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.Carlos Osorio\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

The Doug Ford<\/a> 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 \u2013 including millions from a controversial worker-training fund.<\/p>\n

The Office of the Premier also said the government is reviewing all payments made to the company and could take further action. <\/p>\n

The business, called Get A-Head, offers an \u201cAI-driven\u201d virtual mental-health counselling platform used for students and police officers. It was acquired by a company called Keel Digital Solutions in 2022. <\/p>\n

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 \u201cred flags\u201d that emerged during the audit process. <\/p>\n

Keel has received a series of payments over the past five years from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities and the Ministry of Health. <\/p>\n

The company\u2019s links to Labour Minister David Piccini have been part of the political storm over his management of the province\u2019s $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund, which hands out cash to unions, companies and non-profits for training programs.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Earlier: Groups that got cash from Ontario training fund increasingly hired lobbyists, numbers show<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Piccini also sat in a rink-side seat at a Toronto Maple Leafs\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Mr. Piccini has also told a radio interviewer that his office chose to give Skills Development Fund money to the program despite the \u201clower-scoring\u201d ranking it received from the civil servants that evaluated applications.<\/p>\n

Hannah Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Premier, said in an e-mailed response to questions sent to her and to Mr. Piccini\u2019s office that a routine audit in 2023 had \u201craised concerns\u201d with what she called an \u201cexternal service provider\u201d and \u201cidentified irregularities,\u201d prompting a \u201ccomprehensive forensic audit.\u201d <\/p>\n

That second audit, which Ms. Jensen said was received last week, recommended sending the results to the provincial police, something she said was done \u201cwithin 24 hours.\u201d She referred all other inquiries to the OPP. <\/p>\n

The OPP did not provide a response to e-mailed questions by Wednesday evening. <\/p>\n

Ahad Bandealy, Keel Digital Solution\u2019s chief digital officer, said in an e-mailed statement that the company \u201cco-operated fully and transparently\u201d with the forensic audit but had \u201cserious concerns about the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said auditors \u201cshowed persistent misunderstandings of corporate vs. not-for-profit structures and misinterpretation of tax rules,\u201d and that Keel was \u201crepeatedly told no irregularities or \u2018red flags\u2019 had been identified that would preclude continuing the government\u2019s partnership with Keel.\u201d <\/p>\n

Globe editorial: The real issue with Ontario\u2019s training fund<\/a><\/p>\n

Mr. Bandealy said the company has not been informed that the OPP is launching an investigation but that it will \u201cwill co-operate fully\u201d if a probe is initiated. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are confident an objective review will confirm our integrity and the quality of our compliance practices,\u201d he said, adding that it was \u201cregrettable\u201d that the government released information to the media before providing company executives with the findings of the audit. <\/p>\n

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 \u201copen, competitive procurement\u201d process in 2019-20. He added that the contract has been renewed several times by the province. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s office from the Skills Development Fund, starting with $2.72-million in 2024.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s spokeswoman, declined to answer questions about why more government funding would have been approved after an audit had already turned up irregularities. <\/p>\n

Ford faces deluge of questions about skills fund as Ontario Legislature returns<\/a><\/p>\n

The referral of the second audit to the OPP was first reported by The Trillium, a news website that focuses on Queen\u2019s Park, on Wednesday. The outlet had also first reported Mr. Piccini\u2019s links to Keel Digital Solutions.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cnot fair, transparent or accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her report says the Labour Minister\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Ontario A-G says grant selection process for skills training program \u2018not fair, transparent\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u201cMinister of Favours.\u201d <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Liberal MPP John Fraser, the party\u2019s leader in the legislature, also repeated his calls for the minister to quit or be fired: \u201cIf he\u2019s still there on Monday, I am going to wonder what\u2019s going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A Globe analysis<\/a> of the partial information provided by the government about the fund, using Ontario\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

With reports from Yang Sun and Stephanie Chambers <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Ontario Premier Doug Ford (right) says he sent the OPP results of audit…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":375270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2148,2138,671,104,2132,692,2147,2131,2143,2144,2140,2133,2130,79,407,746,2142,2137,2159,2134,2135,454,2139,1165,728,2149,108,2154,2155,50,2157,2152,2156,2150,2153,2136,85,2146,80,2145,2151,1458,158,1164,2141,1154,107,2158],"class_list":{"0":"post-375269","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-alberta","9":"tag-arts-news","10":"tag-bc","11":"tag-breaking-news","12":"tag-breaking-news-video","13":"tag-british-columbia","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-canada-news","16":"tag-canada-sports","17":"tag-canada-sports-news","18":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","19":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","20":"tag-canadian-news","21":"tag-economy","22":"tag-education","23":"tag-environment","24":"tag-federal-government","25":"tag-foreign-news","26":"tag-globe-and-mail","27":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","28":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","29":"tag-government","30":"tag-life-news","31":"tag-lifestyle","32":"tag-local-news","33":"tag-manitoba","34":"tag-national-news","35":"tag-new-brunswick","36":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","37":"tag-news","38":"tag-northwest-territories","39":"tag-nova-scotia","40":"tag-nunavut","41":"tag-ontario","42":"tag-pei","43":"tag-photos","44":"tag-political-news","45":"tag-political-opinion","46":"tag-politics","47":"tag-politics-news","48":"tag-quebec","49":"tag-sports-news","50":"tag-technology","51":"tag-travel","52":"tag-trudeau","53":"tag-us-news","54":"tag-world-news","55":"tag-yukon"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}