Ontario’s Auditor General to probe $2.5 billion Skills Development Fund amid questions about grants

Ontario's Auditor General Shelley Spence speaks to the media following the release her Annual Report, at the Ontario Legislature in Toronto, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024.

Ontario’s Auditor General has quietly started a probe into a multi-billion dollar provincial program that writes big cheques to organizations offering to train workers – but couldn’t answer questions from CTV News this week about what some of those grants were actually buying.

Shelley Spence’s office confirmed to CTV News that her audit of the training side of the Skills Development Fund is under way.

But the office didn’t explicitly say when their audit began, or whether it’s related to a pair of grants totaling $11 million that were given to a Toronto-area restaurant chain with ties to the governing PC party.

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CTV News reported on Tuesday that the grant was approved despite bureaucrats giving a score of just 51 per cent to Scale Hospitality’s application, which was also submitted late, according to information at a legislative committee.

At the time, the Scale Hospitality grant was described as a way to train some 1,200 at-risk youth to work at the chain’s restaurants.

But when NDP MPP Jamie West asked questions about those grants and how many people had actually been trained at the legislative committee meeting in September 2024, he didn’t get any answers.

Even today, about a year after submitting those questions in writing, West said in an interview he has yet to receive any details about the grants.

“If you’re spending $11 million, you’d think the minister would be able to instantly tell you how many people are trained, what their return on investment was, and how many jobs were created,” he said.

The programs are billed as ways to prepare Ontario’s work force for new challenges, to recover from COVID-19, and ride out U.S. tariffs.

“Across the province, we’re investing $2.5 billion through the Skills Development Fund to support workers with job training to help them find good paying jobs,” Ford said at an announcement in Kitchener earlier this month.

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) had raised red flags about the Skills Development Fund, saying that it was sapping money from existing public colleges with little oversight.

In a report called “Dismantling Public Futures” released this week, OPSEU argued that 650 programs were being cut from colleges across the province as revenue from international students dried up amid federal immigration changes.

OPSEU projected a loss of some 10,000 jobs – and said there could be wide-ranging impacts throughout Ontario, especially outside of big cities.

“When educational pathways disappear, young people have fewer reasons to stay, accelerating the cycle of rural decline and workforce shortages that these training programs were designed to address,” the report says.

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The legislative committee heard that one of the staffers to work on the Scale Hospitality grant was Amin Massoudi, who began working for Premier Doug Ford when he was a Toronto City Councillor, worked in the premier’s office, and then became a lobbyist.

Massoudi’s company later represented Scale Hospitality, public records show. He has said that all efforts around the “many merits and positive social impacts of this proposal were appropriately registered and fully compliant.”

In 2023, CTV News reported that Massoudi, then-Minister Kaleed Rasheed, and developer Shakir Rehmatullah got massages at the same time at a spa in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas – something that contradicted the story they had told the province’s integrity commissioner at the time.

The story immediately preceded a decision by Premier Doug Ford to cancel plans to develop billions of dollars worth of land in the Greenbelt. Rasheed resigned, as did another aide, Jae Truesdell, joining other resignations by then Housing Minister Steve Clark and his chief of staff, Ryan Amato. The RCMP’s investigation of the Greenbelt deals is ongoing.

In discussing the Scale Hospitality grants, OPSEU President JP Hornick suggested there were “shades of the Greenbelt” scandal in questions around the Skills Development Fund.

Ontario’s Auditor General also investigated the Greenbelt, finding in a blockbuster report that the decision to remove land from the Greenbelt was heavily influenced by well-connected developers.

This time, that office said, “This audit plans to examine the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development’s processes and systems for managing the Skills Development Fund Training Stream.”