...... the 99 scandals of Doug, and if another scandal should happen to call, 100 scandals of Doug on the wall.
Move over Greenbelt/OSDF/OSC/Therme/Island Airport/Beer Store/Private Jet/Toronto Islands/Private Surgical Clinics/Health Care/Education etc etc etc scandal, Doug is proud to add another whopper of a scandal to his wall of shame.
Why Doug Ford’s OSAP scandal goes beyond private colleges
Nov. 11, 2026By Martin Regg CohnPolitical Columnist
Martin Regg Cohn is a Toronto-based columnist focusing on Ontario politics and international affairs for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @reggcohn.
Doug Ford’s latest scandal is unlike the others that came before it. Here’s why.
The burgeoning OSAP boondoggle is much more than a student aid program gone awry. When you connect the dots of this fiasco, it impacts all Ontarians and implicates the entire government — from Ford on down.
Mostly, it is malfeasance of his own making. In his misguided bid to save money, the premier wasted taxpayer funds and wreaked havoc with higher education.
That’s a lousy return on disinvestment.
With billions of dollars at stake annually in increasingly dodgy disbursements, OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Program) became an irresistible target for fraudsters: rogue students, rapacious immigration consultants and reckless private colleges.
But that’s only the half of it. The government didn’t just give away the store; Ford’s Tories made it easy for the culprits to get away with the goods.
First, the premier starved the higher education system of funding after taking power eight years ago (tuition was cut 10 per cent and frozen). In a weakened state, desperate for funds, schools were openly encouraged to shop overseas for students willing to pay higher foreign fees (often with lower marks).
In the frenzy that followed, Ontario did what others didn’t — it allowed students to take online-only courses, post-pandemic. This created fertile ground for fraud by wayward consultants who milked students and bilked the system.
For years, Queen’s Park ignored warnings from the provincial auditor general, Career Colleges Ontario and the federal government, not to mention hundreds of tips and complaints. Finally, a panicked government pulled the plug on all loans and grants for the private, profitmaking, “career college” system earlier this year and belatedly called in the cops.
The Ontario Provincial Police are reviewing the case and Queen’s Park has gone to court against alleged fraudsters. The government’s pleading makes interesting reading:
In some cases, these consultants — who charge high fees to recruit customers — cashed in by filling in hundreds of student OSAP applications from just a few IP addresses (computer connections), and improperly submitted coursework on behalf of absentee students, the government alleges.
Now, students who applied in good faith to private operators — operators fully accredited by the Ontario government — are paying the price for the sudden suspension of all OSAP funding for all private career colleges.
The sledgehammer approach fails to distinguish between bad actors and innocent victims. It’s as if the government suspended welfare payments to all needy recipients across Ontario merely because it uncovered fraud in certain segments.
But it gets worse. All these contortions led to further distortions in the system.
As OSAP was sapped of scarce funds by undeserving applicants and unscrupulous consultants in the private sector, qualified students in Ontario’s 47 public colleges and universities were shortchanged.
Last February, the government announced it was reducing OSAP grants from 85 per cent to 25 per cent of all disbursements (with the remainder in loans). It blamed rising costs and misuse by students, without coming clean about the underlying problems
“Folks, it was in the red, it was just not sustainable,” the premier proclaimed last February: “I’ve heard some nightmare stories … about kids going out there buying fancy watches and cologne” while enrolling in “basket-weaving courses.”
Raising the alarm, the government claimed that overall OSAP funding was surging out of control without identifying the true culprit — a private sector system that was siphoning funds away from the public sector. In fact, it was a false signal from Ford.
The data tells a damning tale, as revealed by Allison Jones of The Canadian Press after she filed a freedom of information request. The real problem was not public overuse but private abuse.
In the 2023-24 fiscal year, OSAP grants to students in private career colleges amounted to $554 million; that ballooned to $994 million a year later. About 95 per cent of all grant money went to the private system, where the average student received nearly three times more than their public counterparts.
Tellingly, grants flowing to university students actually went down in that same time period. Yet these students were told that “unsustainable” increases were forcing the Tories to act.
Now, cheated and chastened, the government has owned up. Career college students will no longer be eligible for OSAP grants (in line with federal policy); and online-only programs will no longer be eligible for student aid.
Ford’s Tories have starved all the public colleges and universities that previous Progressive Conservative governments built up over the decades. And they have presided over the diversion of scarce financial aid from the public to private sectors.
By plundering our public campuses and privileging these private for-profit schools, the premier has robbed Peter to pay Paul. That’s not just a fail by Ford, it’s a scandal that cries out for an accounting.
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