Ontario has referred concerns about student financial assistance payments at private career colleges to the Ontario Provincial Police, Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn announced Tuesday, escalating a fraud probe that began after industry watchdogs flagged suspicious OSAP activity in early 2023.
The referral follows startling findings from a Canadian Press investigation of court records and freedom-of-information data. Career Colleges Ontario flagged "indicators consistent with suspicious activity" in January 2023, and analysis of 2022–2024 data found 10 schools with anomalous OSAP application increases averaging 855 per cent — one school ballooned from just 107 applications in 2022 to 2,992 in 2024, a jump of 2,700 per cent.
The money at stake is enormous. Provincial grants to students at only seven career colleges totalled roughly $385 million in 2024–25 — equal to the grants for all of Ontario's publicly funded colleges combined, and more than all Ontario university students received — plus another $137 million in federal grants.
About 18 months after the first warnings, the province made five schools ineligible for OSAP, citing "compromised participation" in asynchronous online programs. Inspectors found 39 of 42 student files at one Bay Street location in Toronto sharing IP addresses tied to a single recruiter, and some students could not name their own institution or communicate in English.
