Amid concerns about $11 million from the province’s Skills Development Fund (SDF) going to applicants with close ties to the governing PC party instead of to the province’s beleaguered colleges, Ontario’s labour ministry has released numbers it says show those grants delivered results. Figures released following about a week of questions by CTV News show about 5,300 people were trained and 3,600 got jobs in the program run by Scale Hospitality, which slightly overshot its target to train at-risk youth to work in its network of restaurants. “We’re investing significant dollars year over year,” said Minister of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security, Nolan Quinn, when asked about the fund at an unrelated news conference on Wednesday. “We’re going to consistently step up and be there for the college and university system.” The grants—a fraction of the $2.5 billion fund—had been flagged by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), after it emerged that a legislature committee was told they had been approved despite low scores and being filed late. On top of that, a premier’s office staffer who worked on the file and later became the company’s lobbyist was Amin Massoudi. CTV News previously reported that Massoudi was one of the people on a trip to Las Vegas who got a massage at the same time as a minister and a developer looking to build on the province’s Greenbelt—a report that preceded the premier cancelling plans to develop the area. OPSEU had complained that amid massive layoffs, program cuts, and an ongoing strike at Ontario’s network of colleges, it was colleges that needed the SDF, not private companies. In response, the leader of private sector union LiUNA, Joseph Mancinelli, walked the organization out of the Ontario Federation of Labour. “LiUNA has a strong partnership with our colleges in Ontario and it is a disservice to create a conflict between private sector training centres and colleges. This is nothing but bad politics attacking the Ford government,” he said. Mancinelli, a staunch Ford supporter, had praised the SDF at a campaign stop with Ford in February, which came just months after LiUNA was promised $26 million for a training centre in Vaughan. “No other government in my 47 years at LiUNA has introduced a program like the Ford government has in the province of Ontario,” he said at the time. At that announcement, Ford promised that “a re-elected Ford Government will put $1 billion, with a ‘B,’ to the Skills Development Fund.” The fund has featured prominently in plenty of provincial government announcements, including one doling out $12.9 million at a rubber plant in Kitchener earlier this month. More connections between Ford government and Scale Hospitality One of Scale Hospitality’s restaurants, the Wheat Sheaf, hosted then-Labour Minister Monte McNaughton for a news conference in 2022 about deploying the opioid agonist naloxone to certain workplaces. Scale Hospitality’s Hanif Harji stood close to McNaughton, and in his turn at the podium, said to him, “Your tireless effort and dedication in support of the hospitality industry as we recover from the pandemic has been priceless, so thanks so much for that.” When he returned to the lectern, McNaughton thanked Harji in turn saying, “Scale Hospitality, the establishment we’re in today, is doing incredible work not just on the health and safety work, but also in recruiting… Thank you for everything you’re doing. You’ve got a great team here.” The SDF issue may have been the final straw for LiUNA, which has had its differences with the rest of the labour movement over the years, but is significant because of the union’s size, at about 100,000 members, said labour geographer Steven Tufts with York University. As for the SDF itself, Tufts said there’s evidence that it has helped workers in the province re-tool after the pandemic, and if the auditor-general discovers political interference in its investigation, the fund shouldn’t be wound down, as the Greenbelt development was. “Not everybody who received SDF funding is necessarily supportive of the Ford government. But some of those unions and private sector partners that did receive funding did endorse Ford in the last election,” Tufts said. A spokesperson for Labour Minister David Piccini said that the SDF was part of its investment in workers getting the skills to enter the workforce. “Through our Skills Development Fund (SDF) we have supported hundreds of programs to train thousands of students through partnerships with colleges and universities. In fact, through the 4th round of SDF, over 40 projects are being delivered in partnership with colleges across Ontario, totalling $75 million worth of funding. This is in addition to other SDF programs that aim to support the training of over one million workers to build the strongest workforce in Canada,” the spokesperson said.
