As legislators return to Queen’s Park, Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he feels “terrible” for honest students caught up in a career college system where financial aid is now unavailable, but opposition leaders say the students are only in that situation because of him.
Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn paused Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) payments at all private post-secondary institutions earlier this month after he said preliminary findings of a KPMG audit turned up significant concerns.
Critics say the ministry should have acted sooner on a spike in OSAP usage at a relatively small number of career colleges, and they question why the solution is to make all students pay the price.
“They’re all being penalized because these guys screwed up royally, and I don’t know whether it’s just total incompetence or complicity or some mixture of both, but it’s bad,” said interim Liberal leader John Fraser.
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The opposition parties spent much of question period on the first day of the legislature returning from a 147-day break calling for Quinn to be fired for his handling of the issue.
In February, Quinn announced that the amount of OSAP grants that students at publicly funded colleges and universities could receive would be cut because the program was becoming “unsustainable.”
But data obtained by The Canadian Press through a series of freedom-of-information requests showed that usage at colleges and universities was relatively flat, but career college usage was skyrocketing. Much of that was due to large year-over-year increases from a small number of schools.
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NDP critic Peggy Sattler said Quinn blamed students when his government should have been keeping a closer eye on the money.
“For more than three years, this government has been shovelling hundreds of millions of OSAP grant funding to a handful of private career colleges without any oversight, monitoring, or accountability,” she said in the legislature.
“That’s why OSAP costs were rising. If this isn’t gross incompetence, it’s something worse, and all the details will soon be coming out. Will the premier take responsibility for the OSAP fiasco and fire his minister of colleges and universities?”
Ford defended Quinn, saying he is doing “an incredible job,” and directed his ire at the career colleges he accuses of being bad actors.
“Do you know who I feel terrible for?” Ford said. “These honest students that got trapped in the private college system … There’s some good operators there, but got caught with the bad apples.”
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Quinn said the pause was a necessary step.
“I do really sympathize for the students that are caught up in this, the good students that are really caught up in this, but we have to make sure that taxpayer dollars are respected,” he said.
Quinn said his ministry acted when it received tips and complaints, but critics say it should not have taken outside tips for the ministry to act on its own data showing rapidly increasing OSAP usage at some schools.
“Well, recognizing that it is a tips-based system, we’ve investigated over 3,200 different OSAP complaints since 2020, and we’ll continue to do that, ensuring that there is compliance across the OSAP,” he said.
Quinn has referred the matter to the Ontario Provincial Police, who are reviewing the information to determine whether to launch an investigation.
Ontario refers OSAP concerns at private career colleges to provincial police
