If you have been paying only casual attention to the Ontario Student Assistance file over the past few months and seen headlines like this one from July, where the province suspended several private colleges from the program, and this one from last week, where the province sicced the Ontario Provincial Police on unnamed private colleges and suspended all private institutions from receiving OSAP funding, you might be under the impression that the Ontario government is very serious about protecting the Ontario Student Assistance Program.
Unfortunately, that is wrong. Not only did the Ontario government wink at fraud in the system for at least two years, but it used this fraud as an excuse to cut hundreds of millions of dollars of grant funding to students attending public post-secondary institutions, and is currently cutting tens of millions of dollars in student aid from students at private institutions which are utterly blameless. It’s a scandal.
Here’s the story:
Figure 1 is based on data from provincial student aid agencies that I have acquired by FOI. It compares total grant aid provided by the province of Ontario – that is OSAP only, excluding any money from the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP) – versus total grant aid provided by the other provincial governments which participate in the CSFAP (i.e. excluding Quebec). It shows clearly that starting in 2023-24, grants in Ontario began rising much faster than they did in the rest of the country. By the fall of 2024-25, grants in Ontario had more than doubled in value in Ontario relative to where they had been three years earlier whereas in the rest of the country there were up only fifteen percent. This is mighty peculiar given that all provinces more or less use the same eligibility and need assessment criteria. What this graph tells you is that someone should have been smelling a rat twenty-four months ago.
Figure 1: Change in Provincial Student Grant Aid over Time, Ontario vs. Rest of CSFAP, 2021-22 to 2024-25, 2021-22 = 100
Now, figure 1 does not show specifically that the jump is coming from private colleges, because my FOIs don’t ask for the breakdown by type. But check out the data in Figure 2 that Trillium reporter Katherine Declerq acquired and published back in the spring.
Figure 2: Total Federal and Provincial Grants by Institution Type, Ontario, in Unadjusted Current Dollars, 2014-15 to 2024-25
Now Declerq’s data is different than mine in the sense that hers includes both federal (CSFAP) and provincial (OSAP) aid, but regardless: if you put figures 1 and 2 together, it should have been clear as early as 2024 if not 2023 that a) something was going on in Ontario that was not going on in other CSFAP provinces, i.e. that it was a made-in-Ontario phenomenon, and, b) that something was going on in the private colleges.
Now, what was it exactly that was going on? Well, from what I have been able to piece together from various folks in a position to know, a handful of private colleges were a) creating online programs of over one year in length, thus making them eligible for federal grant aid as well as provincial aid, and, b) engaging in some shady selling to individual students. Let me take those two parts separately.
The first part I know for sure – it’s how the federal government got drawn into this mess and also why it eventually cut all private institutions out of the grants systems in last year’s federal budget (something I wrote about back here before I had any of this context). The feds don’t have the power to cut out any single institution from the program (only provinces have that), and so the feds spent most of 2025 asking Ontario “what the hell is going on in those institutions”? And when they were fobbed off with various weak-ass answers (”it’s a post-COVID thing…online education is big now, we shouldn’t try to stifle innovation…”), the feds pulled the plug. So, important data point here: the feds knew there was something bad in a specific few institutions over a year ago and asked the province to do something. The province chose not to act.
The second part, re: the nature of the scam, I don’t know for sure. Details will presumably come out in county at some point: Allison Jones of the Canadian Press published some juicy preliminary tidbits about ten days ago. But just for now, assume that something was happening, something bad enough that Career Colleges Ontario (CCO), the association which represents private post-secondary institutions in Ontario, was moved to tell the government – “we have bad actors in our sector and you need to act”. We know this is the case because the government said so in its press release last week. But again, check the date. CCO did this in January 2025. So why did it take so long for the province to move?
(I assume there are journalists out there looking at political contributions made by the owners of these institutions. This work will be helpful in understanding provincial government motivations).
One might try to excuse the government’s lengthy time-to-get-off-its-ass by saying “oh that’s just the speed of government, it never does anything quickly.” But this is not true. The government may have waited until this summer to move against bad actor private colleges, but it used the crisis to attack students and OSAP itself much earlier.
Cast your minds back for a second to that frabjous day in February when the provincial government announced it was putting $6.4 billion dollars back into grants for universities and colleges over four years, ending what amounted to a fifteen-year slide in these grants. (It was actually about a billion less than that because it included previously-announced funding, but we’ll leave that aside for now). I’ve been told that until very late in the day for that announcement, all that new money was supposed to come from general government coffers. Then, suddenly, someone (either from Finance or the Premier’s Office, still not quite sure which) said “hold it. Your Ministry has ballooning costs in its student aid program. You need to fix that first.” The result: big cuts to student aid, which I wrote about here.
So, remember: the government had known it had a ballooning spending problem due to anomalous growth in specific private colleges since the fall of 2024 at the absolute latest. In January 2025 it was given evidence by CCO that certain actors in the private college sector were doing bad things. According to that Allison Jones piece, the federal government was discovering deeply disturbing things about some of these schools in spring 2025. And yet, in February 2026, when it came time to make a decision to reduce student aid spending in order to make it sustainable, what did the Ontario Government do? In the short term, it protected the privates and cut hundreds of millions of dollars a year from public university students’ aid packages; and now this past week, it has robbed students of private colleges that have done no wrong of millions of dollars as well.
This is deep weasel territory.
The thing is, the Government absolutely knew back in February how weasel-like this was. To the extent it ever chose justified the cut, it was in a briefing deck issued to media (not made public but I have a copy) on the day of the announcement. This deck included the following, almost impenetrable graph, which showed out of control cost growth that simply had to be contained.
Figure 3: Weaselly Government of Ontario OSAP Graph from 12 Feb 2026 Media Briefing
What do the terms “allocation” and “base pressures” mean? And why was new growth anticipated? All can now, apparently be revealed. “Allocation” was what the program would have cost had remained in line with where they were a couple of years earlier. “Base pressures”, I am now convinced, is the extra cost associated with spending on privates and “anticipated new growth” was the cost of Ontario accepting the federal government’s share of payments to students at private colleges that had been abandoned in the 2025 Budget. In other words, the Government of Ontario clearly knew the problem was all about privates. But instead of being honest with the public about this, it chose to hide behind weasel words to obscure the fact that they were going after public post-secondary students when the problem was quite clearly a few bad actor private colleges. And why? It’s clear: to protect the option of continuing to fund bad-actor privates.
This all stinks to high heaven. The government which claims it is “getting tough on fraud” actually spent years dragging its feet on the issue and then used it as an excuse to make all students poorer. This is contemptible. The OSAP cuts – which were based on a lie designed to protect bad actor private colleges – need to be reversed, and aid to good actor privates need to be re-instated. Now.
