Ontario says in a statement of claim that it wants $25.7-millon in damages from Get A-Head, its owner Keel Digital Solutions, and some executives and directors.Eduardo Lima/The Canadian Press
The Ontario government is going to court to seek millions in damages from Keel Digital Solutions Corp., a company that received taxpayer money from the province’s Skills Development Fund and is facing a police investigation for its use of provincial cash.
The government alleges in a lawsuit filed in the Ontario Superior Court that the company, its subsidiary and five executives engaged in “fraudulent misrepresentation” to renew contracts with both the postsecondary education and labour ministries, and misled auditors. The government demands $25.7-million in damages.
The case is the latest development in the controversy over Ontario’s $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund, which has dogged the provincial government for months, prompted a probe by Ontario’s MPP ethics watchdog and called into question hundreds of millions of dollars of government grants.
The office of Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced the court action on Friday morning, saying it had filed a statement of claim against Get A-Head, which runs a digital counselling platform, and its owner, Keel Digital Solutions.
The lawsuit also includes a demand for punitive damages of $100,000 each from five company executives, among them Keel president and chief executive officer Rob Godfrey, chief operating officer Jay Fischbach and chief digital officer Ahad Bandealy. The allegations have not been tested in court.
Mr. Fischbach said in an e-mail on Friday morning that the lawsuit was “deeply flawed, built on misstatements and outright inaccuracies.” He said the company would be filing a counterclaim against the government.
“Keel Digital has never been involved in any fraudulent activity, and we fully expect the government of Ontario to be compelled to retract its claims, apologize, and answer for the recklessness and malice that drove this case,” the e-mail reads.
The company has previously denied any wrongdoing and has said that it was being made a “scapegoat” amid the controversy that has surrounded the distribution of money from the Skill Development Fund.
An Auditor-General’s report last fall criticized the administration of the fund, which distributes money to employers, unions and other organizations for programs to train workers. The report said the office of Ontario Labour Minister David Piccini had ignored recommendations from bureaucrats and given hundreds of millions of dollars to less qualified recipients, while higher-scoring applications were passed over.
Some of the groups who received cash had hired lobbyists with close links to the government, or were led by large donors to the Progressive Conservatives.
Opposition leaders again called on the premier to fire Labour Minister David Piccini on Friday.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
The province’s Integrity Commissioner is investigating opposition complaints alleging that Mr. Piccini broke MPP ethics rules, and the allegations submitted to her office include his dealings with Keel Digital Solutions.
The government said last fall that it had forwarded the results of a forensic audit into the company to the Ontario Provincial Police, which later said it had launched an investigation.
Keel, which operated an artificial intelligence-driven online counselling portal for students and police officers, was providing services under a contract with the Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security before it was awarded $7.5-million in grants from the Skills Development Fund. In all, it had been awarded about $40-million in provincial government money over the past five years.
Mr. Piccini has said that he approved the application for Skills Development Fund money from Keel, even though the company had received a low score from ministry bureaucrats.
Last fall, the minister attended the Paris wedding of Keel’s lobbyist. And in 2023, before he became minister, he sat rinkside at a Toronto Maple Leafs game with an independent director of the company. Mr. Piccini has said he paid his own way for both the game and the wedding.
The lawsuit unveiled Friday alleges that from 2022 to 2025, the company provided “false and misleading” reports of its performance measures in order to renew its contracts with Ontario’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities.
The company provided its platform and software for students needing practice therapy hours to offer virtual counselling sessions to other students. But the government alleges Keel inflated the numbers of students it helped, “systematically misleading the Crown ... in order to extract maximum compensation.”
The lawsuit alleges that Get A-Head and Keel included mock or training sessions in its totals, and broke longer sessions into 20 minutes chunks – boosting the tallies it reported to the government by more than 10 times.
It alleges that the defendants “reported plainly ineligible expenses in their budgets ... such as first-class airfare, international office space, and fine dining, which they hid in generic line items and presented as eligible project costs.” It also says the company and its executives retained unspent government funds as additional profit, contrary to agreements with the province.
The government’s statement of claim says that in early 2023, it assessed the company for an overpayment of nearly $80,000 and sent in government auditors at the time to take a look. But the defendants “refused to provide data or financial records,” the lawsuits says.
Despite this, the Ministry of Colleges and Universities still renewed its contract with the company, which also secured funding from the Labour Ministry’s Skills Development Fund, for a project involving online counselling for police officers.
In its court filing, the government said the forensic audit report it received last November concluded that Get A-Head had “weak to no controls in place” for how its digital platform was used.
The auditors also “identified possible conflicts of interest, dubious administrative expenses and poor value for money” and concluded “there was a reasonable basis to believe criminal fraud may have occurred,” the claim alleges.
In November, Mr. Bandealy, Keel’s chief digital officer, had said the government’s “junior auditors assigned to the file lacked a fundamental understanding of corporate structures, tax law, and health-privacy legislation.”
The company also released an 18-second audio clip of what it said was a senior auditor telling Mr. Godfrey there were no red flags preventing the government from moving ahead with a new contract.
Opposition leaders on Friday repeated their calls for Mr. Ford to fire his Labour Minister.
“Rather than take accountability for this mess, Ford is once again going to court to cover his tracks, and it’s Ontario taxpayers left footing the bill,” Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles said in a press release.
Ontario Liberal MPP John Fraser, his party’s leader in the legislature, said an independent inquiry should be launched into the entire Skills Development Fund.