Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
Jon Liedtke discusses the Ontario government’s enormous OSAP scandal after seven private colleges received $385 million in grants, equaling the funding of all 24 public colleges combined. The province responded by freezing funding across the entire private college sector and referring the matter to the OPP for an investigation while leaving thousands of legitimate students completely stranded.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: It is time for Liedtke’s Got a Take. Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Well, we’re gonna talk about the Ontario Student Assistance Program, OSAP. Now, the Liberals are asking the Auditor General to investigate OSAP. And the Liberal Colleges and Universities Critic, Tyler Watt, requested this value-for-money audit. And this is his quote, not mine—I don’t need to be sued—he says, “This has all the makings of a Doug Ford next billion-dollar scandal.” So, Jon, governments launch audits and they look into programs all the time. Now, is referring this to the OPP really a major scandal, or just sort of like an administrative cleanup?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, you know, for the government to be referring this to the OPP, I guess it is a big deal. I wouldn’t call this, you know, just administrative scandal or administrative cleanup. I mean, if this is just administrative cleanup, then when I was on a cruise ship and they drained it because a child decided to use the pool as a bathtub, that was just a minor cleanup, I suppose. I mean, we gotta call this what it is: it’s a full-blown, industrial-scale siphoning of public dollars while the province was asleep at the wheel. Look at the raw Freedom of Information numbers that the Canadian Press has pulled. Just seven strip-mall-type private career colleges pulled in $385 million through provincial OSAP grants—just so those seven ones were accounting for that $385 million in one single academic year. Now, those are private colleges. Contrast that with the entire public system, which received $385 million as well across all 24 Ontario public colleges combined. So, seven private operations matched the grant footprint of Humber, Seneca, St. Clair College, and 21 other institutions combined. So, when 95% of all new provincial grant spending in Ontario is being funneled into a handful of unmonitored—which in these cases were online—cash course factories, you’re not looking at rounding errors or administrative issues or bookkeeping glitches. This is a huge multi-hundred-million-dollar drain on our Treasury. So, the province didn’t call up the OPP because they felt like this was routine housekeeping; they sent it to them because what became so clear was a problem that they couldn’t keep ignoring it anymore.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. You know, I think most people don’t realize how much money went to these few little mills, education mills, I guess we could call them. So, the Minister first brought in KPMG, the accounting firm, now froze funding, they’ve handed the file over to the police. So, isn’t Queen’s Park taking the proper decisive action here?
Jon Liedtke: I think that they’re playing firefighter right now after letting the house burn down to the foundation. I mean, the Minister wants a pat on the back for proactive crackdowns, but the paper trail shows a completely different narrative that gets blown up from what the Minister’s saying. Court records show that the institution which processes these applications—it’s an industry association, Career Colleges Ontario—they were dropping formal red flags on the Ministry’s desk about suspicious, massive application spikes way back in January of ’23, I believe. So, Queen’s Park knew about those warnings for nearly four years while hundreds of millions of dollars was walking out the door. They didn’t call in KPMG out of sudden institutional vigilance; they did it because journalists were filing Freedom of Information requests and pulling back the curtains on it. And then calling in the OPP on October the 2nd, after almost $400 million has been extracted—I don’t see that as leadership, I see it as pure, panicked, cover-your-backside damage control.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. You know, here’s what I’m trying to figure out. How does a private career college even game OSAP to that level? I mean, what was actually going on here behind closed doors?
Jon Liedtke: Well, you know, bureaucratic laziness. So, we gotta go back to the pandemic. Oh, so many of our problems go back to the pandemic. So, the province opened OSAP eligibility up to asynchronous, online-only programs at private colleges and then virtually abandoned any real oversight, like it was a Zoom meeting that they walked away from the screen. I mean, when you throw unmonitored online modules together with zero identity verification, bad actors can turn government financial aid into a self-dispensing ATM. I mean, the Ministry’s own inspection reports filed in court reveal absolute regulatory comedy. They found “course-in-a-day” setups where ghost users or even third-party operators—that’s other people, not the student—logged in and knocked out entire semester courses, quizzes, and final exams in less than a full day. They tracked single user accounts operating across multiple IP addresses. They found private career colleges sharing physical office suites with immigration recruitment outfits. It wasn’t a sophisticated heist; this is a wide-open door with a sign saying, “Take what you want.”
Gene Valaitis: Wow. So, how does this hit the average Ontario taxpayer or student going to any post-secondary Ontario school?
Jon Liedtke: You know, this is where political cynicism becomes sickening, Gene. Earlier this year, the Ford government gutted OSAP grants for legitimate students at public universities and colleges. They capped grants at just 25%, forcing kids to take 75% of their aid on as debt, and lifted the domestic tuition freeze. Then the Minister stood up and defended those brutal cuts by claiming overall OSAP budget growth was unsustainable. But the data exposed the lie: public university students weren’t blowing up the budget; 95% of the budget growth was being gobbled up by private online operators. So, students at Brock, McMaster, or University of Windsor were forced to swallow higher tuition and drown in personal debt just to cover the fiscal crater being left unchecked by private operators. So, the government didn’t use a scalpel on the problem; they used a sledgehammer on public students to cover their own oversight failures.
Gene Valaitis: Wow. Well, is the government freezing funding across the entire private career college sector really the best way to stop the bleeding, or not?
Jon Liedtke: I think it’s just lazy policy, Gene. It’s like carpet-bombing the entire sector because you failed to police a dozen bad actors. By slamming a blanket freeze across all almost 600 private career colleges mid-semester, they’re crushing legitimate, essential institutions. I mean, there are essential places like Mothercraft, for example—they train early childhood educators, and they’ve been doing it for decades. Or look at locally accredited dental hygiene programs. Those students are six, seven weeks into terms, relying on OSAP transfers to pay rent, groceries, cover tuition, and overnight their aid is frozen. They’re left hanging in complete financial limbo, wondering if they’re gonna have to drop out of their classes. And that’s coming from students who have been giving interviews with the media. Compliant, hardworking trade students are even taking the hit for government’s complete inability to manage their own programs.
Gene Valaitis: Sounds like the majority suffer because of the few. Where does it go from here, Jon? How does a province fix a system that is so broken?
Jon Liedtke: First, the OPP needs to follow the money, lay criminal charges where fraud occurred. Second, Queen’s Park needs to be changing regulations or passing promised legislation to shut off OSAP access for unmonitored, asynchronous online programs permanently. But let’s talk about the underlying structural absurdity. The Ministry of Colleges and Universities employs eight inspectors—eight—to cover nearly 600 private career colleges across the entire province. That’s not enforcement; that’s a joke—it’s administrative jokes. It’s an honor system with a rubber stamp from the government. So, until Queen’s Park puts actual compliance officers on the ground and treats regulatory enforcement seriously, Ontario taxpayers will keep getting fleeced while ministers act surprised when the cops show up, and students are gonna be left in the lurch.
Gene Valaitis: A great take. I thank you this morning, and we’ll be talking to you on Friday.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke with Liedtke’s Got a Take.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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