Company embroiled in skills fund controversy received Ontario cash last month during audit

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The company at the centre of a political storm related to Ontario’s Skills Development Fund says it was still receiving money from the program last month, even while the province subjected it to a forensic audit that the government has since forwarded to the OPP.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Jay Fischbach, the chief operating officer of Keel Digital Solutions, the company in question, said it has been receiving payments of about $240,000 a month, including in October, from the Skills Development Fund.

“We expect to receive this month’s money at the end of the month. We haven’t been told it’s not coming,” Mr. Fischbach said.

That appeared to contradict an assertion from Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who told reporters on Monday that all funding for the company was frozen “right across the board” when potential problems were found. His office has said that a routine audit in 2023 revealed “irregularities” that prompted a second, 10-month forensic audit, which wrapped up earlier this month.

A spokeswoman for the Premier, Hannah Jensen, said on Wednesday that the company’s funding was only frozen when that second audit revealed issues and its findings were sent to the OPP earlier this month.

Company that received millions from Ontario calls for release of audit referred to police

Mr. Fischbach said Keel Digital Solutions – which has received about $40-million in taxpayer funds from three different ministries to run its virtual counselling services – was never informed of any “red flags” during the audit process.

“All of a sudden the SDF affair broke, and now magically we’re being referred to the OPP,” Mr. Fischbach said.

The two audits in question were for a contract the company has with the province’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities, not the Skills Development Fund. The company says the government has in fact withheld $8.33-million in payments under the Ministry of Colleges and Universities contract since April.

This contract is for a virtual counselling platform for university students, staffed by psychology students who need practice hours as part of their programs, Mr. Fischbach said. The system allows sessions to be evaluated by an artificial intelligence tool.

The company’s $7.5-million in grants from the Skills Development Fund is for a similar digital mental-health peer-counselling platform for police in Peel Region, and for training police officers to use it. The Premier himself touted the program’s benefits at an event to announce the funding in the summer of 2024.

Company says Ontario is scapegoating it to deflect from Skills Development Fund controversy

The company has asserted in a series of press statements this week that it has been made into a scapegoat for the clouds surrounding the government’s $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund. The province’s Auditor-General, Shelley Spence, concluded in a report last month that the distribution of $1.3-billion in grants from the program was “not fair, transparent or accountable.”

Her report said 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. Many grants went to groups with large Progressive Conservative donors among their leadership, and who had hired lobbyists with connections to the Ford government.

Labour Minister David Piccini has acknowledged that he approved the $7.5-million in Skills Development Fund grants for Keel Digital Solutions even though it was a lower-scoring program, saying it was important to support help for police.

Opposition leaders have seized on the minister’s links with Keel Digital Solutions: He attended the Paris wedding of a lobbyist for the company last month, and sat in a rink-side seat at a Toronto Maple Leafs game with a member of the company’s board in 2023, before becoming Labour Minister. The minister has said he paid his own way for both events.

OPP confirms review of reported ‘suspicious activity’ tied to company that received millions from Ontario

Mr. Fischbach said the good that his company’s platform had done has been lost in the shuffle: “The police are happy. Taxpayers got good value. No lobbyist wedding changes the fact that taxpayers got good value from this.”

The OPP said last Friday that its anti-rackets branch is looking into the matter in order to determine whether to launch a criminal investigation after the government had referred “suspicious activity” related to transfer payments to the company.

Mr. Fischbach said the company was notified about the second forensic audit in late November of 2024. Keel Digital Solutions, he said, provided all of its data to the government’s auditors by January of this year.

Also on Wednesday, Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles was ejected from the provincial legislature after refusing to withdraw her assertion that Mr. Ford leads a “corrupt government” for its handling of the Skills Development Fund.

Under the legislature’s rules, MPPs cannot accuse other members of lying or use other language deemed unparliamentary. Usually, an MPP agrees to withdraw their offending comments. But on Wednesday, Ms. Stiles refused and was escorted out of the chamber for the day by the Sergeant-at-Arms.