Ontario skills training funding not fair or transparent, auditor finds
Written by The Canadian Press on October 1, 2025
TORONTO — Ontario’s auditor general says the provincial labour minister’s office has not been using a fair or transparent process to dole out money from a $2.5-billion skills training fund.
The Skills Development Fund gives money to organizations for projects that help hire, train or retrain workers and the auditor says Minister David Piccini’s office is heavily involved in selecting which applicants get money.
Auditor general Shelley Spence says in a report today that more than half of the projects Piccini’s office gave funding to were ranked by bureaucrats as poor, low or medium against the program’s goals and criteria.
Those applications received about $742 million over the first five rounds of funding.
Spence says that in the first two rounds of funding Piccini’s office did not give a documented reason as to why it chose 388 projects that received a total of $479 million.
The auditor also found that 64 low- and medium-ranked projects that Piccini’s office chose for funding had hired registered lobbyists.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 1, 2025.
Allison Jones, The Canadian Press