Ontario skills training funding not fair or transparent, auditor finds

TORONTO — Ontario Labour Minister David Piccini’s office has been heavily involved in selecting projects that get funded under a $2.5-billion skills training program and has doled out money to applicants ranked low by bureaucrats without documenting reasons, the auditor general has found.

The Skills Development Fund gives money to organizations for projects that help hire, train or retrain workers.

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, with those projects receiving about $742 million over the first five rounds of funding, Shelley Spence found.

“It is troubling,” she said at a press conference.

“That’s why we recommended that the staffers take a look at the explanations, and if they don’t make sense, go back to the minister’s office and say, ‘Hey … I’m not understanding why this was selected.'”

The auditor also found that 64 low- and medium-ranked projects that Piccini’s office chose for funding had hired registered lobbyists.

NDP Leader Marit Stiles said it is “textbook preferential treatment.”

“There’s nothing that galls me more than when governments have abused the taxpayers’ trust, the people’s trust,” she said.

A spokesperson for Piccini said the fund is open to everyone and has supported more than 1,000 projects that have helped more than 100,000 people “achieve employment.”

“We have already begun implementing the auditor general’s recommendations through more rigorous tracking of clients, and ongoing evaluation criteria updates as a part of our efforts to improve this life-changing program that is training workers in every corner of the province,” Michel Figueredo wrote in a statement.

Spence found 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.

Similar programs in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador do not have ministers’ offices making specific funding decisions, Spence said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 1, 2025.

Allison Jones, The Canadian Press