The Ontario government filed a lawsuit against Keel, Get A-Head and five executives last month.Eduardo Lima/The Canadian Press
A tech company facing both a police probe and a civil lawsuit from the Ontario government accusing it of “fraudulent misrepresentation” has responded with a counterclaim, saying it did nothing wrong and demanding $100-million in damages.
Toronto-based Keel Digital Solutions Corp., and its subsidiary Get A-Head Inc., filed a statement of defence this week in Ontario Superior Court, accusing the government of subjecting them to a “deeply flawed” audit process and then allowing the disclosure of “inaccurate and misleading” findings to the media, damaging their reputation.
Get A-Head, which has received a total of $40-million in government payments over the past five years, operated an online mental-health counselling portal, augmented with artificial intelligence, under contracts with the province’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities and the Ministry of Health.
The outfit, which now operates as Keel Mind, has also been awarded $7.5-million in grants since 2024 from Ontario’s $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund, a program that the province’s Auditor-General concluded was “not fair, transparent or accountable” in a report last fall. Keel Digital Solutions has previously charged that the government was using it as a “scapegoat” to distract from the skills-fund controversy.
Last month, the government filed a lawsuit against Keel, Get A-Head and five executives, saying they misled the government about Get A-Head’s performance in order to get its contracts with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities renewed. The claim also alleges that they obstructed an audit. The government demanded $25.7-million in damages.
None of the claims in either legal filing have been tested in court.
Ontario sues company in Skills Development Fund controversy for millions in damages
In November, the office of Premier Doug Ford said it had sent the results of a forensic audit of the company’s contracts with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities to the Ontario Provincial Police, which later said it was investigating.
Mr. Ford said at the time that all funding had been cut off, and his office warned senior government officials not to have any contact with Keel Digital Solutions or Get A-Head.
The lawsuit the government filed last month alleges that the companies “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.”
Get A-Head, the government alleged, had also been “systematically misleading” the government on its performance measures, including by inflating the number of students that its portal helped. The government alleged that the company wrongly counted each 20 minutes on the platform as a separate session, even for sessions with a single student that went longer.
But in their counterclaim, Keel Digital Solutions and Get A-Head say the ministry understood and had agreed that the time spent on the platform would be reported in 20-minute increments, which it says is consistent with “guidelines from Canadian and Ontario mental health professionals” and its own government-funded websites.
In an e-mailed statement to media on Friday, the company said the government could have learned this from a “basic Google search.” It also said that 25,000 students and parents had signed a petition supporting the continuation of its counselling program, which was suspended after its funding was cancelled.
In its court filing, Get A-Head alleges that the forensic audit it faced was led by “junior auditors” who “did not understand that [the company] was a for-profit entity” and “failed to understand basic financial concepts.” It alleges that during the audit, the company was “repeatedly reassured” that the probe was “going well.”
The companies’ court filing also says that in January, 2025, the Premier’s chief of staff, Patrick Sackville, contacted Keel president and chief executive officer Rob Godfrey and “expressly represented” that a new deal could be approved after the audit’s completion.
The counterclaim says that “senior political officials leveraged these representations to exert pressure” on the company, to ensure it continued to provide its platform as it awaited the approval and “to extract concessions and favours” that exceeded its “contractual obligations.”
Asked to comment on the counterclaim, Hannah Jensen, a spokeswoman for the Premier, said on Friday that “any alleged conversation referenced in the document came before the concerning results of the forensic audit were known, the results of which were immediately referred to the Ontario Provincial Police.”
Get A-Head was thrust into the spotlight last year amid the political storm over Ontario’s Skills Development Fund, which distributes cash to employers, unions and other organizations for worker-training programs.
The province’s Auditor-General said that the Labour Minister’s office had overridden assessments from nonpolitical bureaucrats and handed out grants to organizations that had scored poorly on their applications, while higher-scoring applicants were passed over.
Labour Minister David Piccini has publicly said that Get A-Head was among the low-scoring applicants he had chosen for funding, to support a program for police officers to use its online mental-health counselling portal.
Opposition politicians have seized on Mr. Piccini’s ties to the company, after it emerged that he had attended the Paris wedding of the company’s lobbyist, and once sat rinkside at a Toronto Maple Leafs game with a board member. Mr. Piccini has said he paid his own way at both events.
The province’s Integrity Commissioner is investigating opposition complaints alleging that Mr. Piccini broke the legislature’s ethics rules. Mr. Piccini’s office has said he is assisting the commissioner’s investigation.
With a report from Laura Stone