Ontario sues Skills Development Fund-linked company over alleged fraud

TORONTO — The Ontario government has filed a lawsuit against a company it contracted to run a student mental health program, alleging fraudulent misrepresentation and seeking to recoup more than $25 million in public money.

Ontario alleges Keel Digital Solutions, through its subsidiary Get A-Head Inc., inflated the number of counselling sessions it reported delivering to students, resulting in overpayments of millions of dollars. The company vigorously denies the allegations.

Between 2022 and 2025, the company "provided false and misleading quarterly reports of their corporate performance measures," which were the basis for its payments, the government alleged in its lawsuit.

"The false reports caused the Crown to pay the corporate defendants millions of dollars that they otherwise would not have been paid," alleged the claim, which was filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Wednesday.

The company said it would be filing a counterclaim.

"The government’s lawsuit against Keel Digital Solutions is deeply flawed, built on misstatements and outright inaccuracies," chief operating officer Jay Fischbach wrote Friday in a statement.

"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."

Keel Digital Solutions was closely scrutinized during the fall sitting of the legislature as one of the recipients of the Ministry of Labour's $2.5-billion Skills Development Fund, a program the auditor general has found was not fair or transparent and doled out money to applicants ranked low by bureaucrats.

Labour Minister David Piccini came under sustained fire from opposition parties calling for his resignation, particularly since media reports said one of Keel's lobbyists is a close friend of Piccini's.

That heat only increased after the government announced it had referred the results of an audit on Keel's funding from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities to the Ontario Provincial Police, citing concerns dating back to 2023.

Critics questioned why the Ministry of Labour gave Keel $7.5 million in skills development funding for a first responder mental health program even after an audit of their student funding had raised concerns within a different ministry.

Piccini has said Keel Digital Solutions is one of the applicants that bureaucrats had ranked low but the ministry decided to fund. He has defended the practice of granting funding to low-scoring applications, saying that's done when they align with government priorities.

Ontario Provincial Police announced last month that they had launched an investigation into Keel's student mental health funding.

Liberal parliamentary leader John Fraser said the government's lawsuit seems self-serving, given that the police are already on the matter.

"This legal action appears designed to distract from the deeper and far more troubling problems at the heart of the Skills Development Fund," he wrote in a statement.

"Doug Ford now wants Ontarians to believe his government was swindled. They were not swindled. They were caught."

In the province's lawsuit, Ontario alleges the company filed estimated expenses as opposed to actual expenses, failed to report unspent funds and interest earned, and overstated the metrics upon which its funding was based.

Get A-Head reported sessions providing counselling to people other than students as well as training mock sessions as student mental health sessions, the province alleges. It also reported the time spent by a counsellor, supervisor and student in one session as three separate sessions, the lawsuit alleges.

"(The company's) 2022-2023 final report claimed 42,556 eligible sessions between March 31, 2022 and March 30, 2023," the government wrote in its lawsuit.

"In actual fact, the Crown has learned that there were only 3,529 unique sessions of any duration during that period."

The province also alleges several executives at the company "directed, facilitated, and then tried to cover up the corporate defendants' false reports" given to the ministry.

None of the allegations have been tested in court.

The company has previously said it has complied with all laws and contractual obligations and looks forward to an apology from the government at the end of the police probe.

Premier Doug Ford and Piccini have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and both have said they remain committed to the Skills Development Fund.

Ontario's integrity commissioner, Cathryn Motherwell, has also launched an ethics investigation into Piccini's dealings with that fund.

Media reports have said that some beneficiaries of the fund are unions that endorsed the Progressive Conservatives in elections and people who have donated to the party.

The auditor general also found that more than 60 of the lower-scoring fund applicants were approved after they hired a lobbyist, which had the opposition crying foul over what they called preferential treatment.

The Skills Development Fund gives money to organizations for projects that help hire, train or retrain workers. The province says they've so far trained about 700,000 people and of those, 100,000 people found jobs within 60 days of completing the program.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 9, 2026.

Allison Jones and Liam Casey, The Canadian Press