EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
The Ford government sent the findings of a “comprehensive forensic audit” of a company enmeshed in the Skills Development Fund controversy to the Ontario Provincial Police last week, it confirmed in a statement to The Trillium.
According to the provincial government, a “routine audit” in 2023 revealed “irregularities” with Get A-Head, a business owned by Keel Digital Solutions, prompting a “comprehensive forensic audit” of the company, which provides a platform for virtual mental health counselling.
Ontario Labour Minister David Piccini recently attended the Parisian wedding of Keel’s lobbyist. Piccini also sat rinkside at a Toronto Maple Leafs game with one of Keel’s directors, months before he was appointed labour minister, and later awarded the company taxpayer funds.
“The results of the audit, received last week, recommended that the matter be referred to the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP),” the government wrote in a statement on Tuesday night. “Within 24 hours of receiving this report, the referral was made. All payments associated with this provider are currently under review, and further actions will be taken based on that outcome.”
Since 2021, three Ontario government ministries have given at least $36.9 million of taxpayer funds to the company, most of which was to provide its mental health platform for college and university students. It was due to receive millions of dollars more from the latest round of the Skills Development Fund (SDF) for its mental health platform to be used by police.
The OPP did not respond before this story’s publication to emailed questions The Trillium asked about Get A-Head/Keel Digital Solutions last Friday.
“I am proud of the impact our platform has had, and we remain committed to supporting students, educators, and trainees across the province,” wrote Ahad Bandealy, founder of Get-A-Head and chief digital officer of Keel Mind, as it’s now called under Keel Digital Solutions, in a statement to The Trillium.
Bandealy didn’t directly address questions about the province’s audit or the OPP in his statement. He did, however, write that, “Any irregularities in data are solely related to how users decided to deploy the platform.”
Controversy has exploded over the Skills Development Fund, the Ford government’s marquee worker-training program, including over grants given to Get A-Head. Labour Minister David Piccini has been peppered with questions about funds his office has awarded to the company since The Trillium revealed he attended the Parisian wedding of its lobbyist last month, and, years earlier, sat rinkside at a Toronto Maple Leafs game with a director of its parent company, Keel Digital Solutions.
Get A-Head’s involvement with the Ontario government began five years ago with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, before Keel acquired it. In an Oct. 6, 2020, news release, the ministry announced it was giving Get A-Head $250,000 in “one-time funding to support the launch of a mental health online application.”
Bandealy said in his statement that the company struck its first agreement with the ministry “through a public, competitive procurement process.”
On May 28, 2021, the Colleges and Universities Ministry said in another news release that it was giving Get A-Head “$300,000 to employ artificial intelligence to support the delivery of virtual mental health services” at three publicly funded post-secondary institutions.
Keel’s talks to purchase Get A-Head began in early 2022, leading to its acquisition later that year, according to what a company executive said in a YouTube video.
According to a journal article authored by Bandealy and other researchers who work for Keel, the company signed an agreement with the province in March 2022 to allow graduate students in mental health programs to earn supervised clinical hours needed to become certified through virtual counselling sessions on the platform. Taxpayer funds began flowing to Get A-Head by the end of that month. The province’s spending disclosures show the Ministry of Colleges and Universities paid $457,500 to the company in the 2021-22 fiscal period.
The next year — from April 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023 — the ministry paid the company just over $8.5 million.
According to the Ford government’s statement on Tuesday, the original “routine audit (that) raised concerns about” Get A-Head/Keel was done in 2023, triggering the forensic audit.
Get A-Head received its first Skills Development Fund grant after an application period that ended in December 2023, at which point it was owned by Keel.
Labour Ministry spending disclosures show Get A-Head began receiving funds from the SDF in the 2024-25 fiscal year.
Piccini has been labour minister since September 2023. He and his staff have selected the last two rounds of SDF recipients. Get A-Head received grants from both rounds, totalling just over $7.5 million, Ministry of Labour data shows.
In a June 2024 news release, Premier Doug Ford’s office said SDF funding would enable Get A-Head’s project to “introduce a new digital platform to help police peer support workers provide mental health care to police services colleagues and their families.”
Get A-Head set out to train 160 peer support workers with the first $2.7 million it received from the SDF. According to data provided by the Labour Ministry, it surpassed its target, training 367.
Piccini’s predecessor, former labour minister Monte McNaughton, launched the Skills Development Fund in early 2021. Since then, the Ford government has given out over 1,000 SDF grants totalling over $1.3 billion to hundreds of labour groups, not-for-profits, municipalities and companies to support their workforces, including through training.
At the beginning of October, Ontario’s auditor general released a report on the SDF, declaring that McNaughton’s and Piccini’s offices’ selection of grant recipients hadn’t been “fair, transparent or accountable.” Auditor general Shelley Spence found both labour ministers’ offices passed over hundreds of SDF applicants whose proposals were scored “high” by non-partisan ministry officials, in favour of ones ranked “medium,” “low” or “poor.”
Spence also highlighted in her report that dozens of “low-” and “medium-” scoring SDF applicants got grants after hiring lobbyists, writing that their role “can create an appearance of real or potential preferential treatment.”
Days after the auditor released her report, Piccini attended the wedding of Keel Digital Solutions’ lobbyist in Paris, France.
The same day The Trillium revealed Piccini had attended the wedding, the labour minister referred to Keel in a radio interview as a “lower-scoring” SDF recipient he was proud of. In the same Newstalk 1010 interview, Piccini said he’s personally been involved in selecting “lower-scoring” funding recipients.
The next day, The Trillium reported that Piccini sat in glass seats at a Toronto Maple Leafs game with a director of Keel Digital Solutions in January 2023. Piccini was environment minister then. He became labour minister in September 2023. Before the premier appointed Piccini to his cabinet, he had been the parliamentary assistant to the colleges and universities minister from June 2019 to June 2021. The ministry first announced funding for Get A-Head in May 2021.
Piccini has said he paid his own way to both the wedding and the Leafs game — though CTV News reported that the Leafs tickets belonged to the family of the Keel director that attended the game with the minister.
The two events are central to an ethics complaint the Ontario Liberals made earlier this month to the integrity commissioner, asking her office to investigate whether Piccini gave “preferential treatment” to certain SDF recipients.
What is Keel Mind?
Keel Mind is an online mental health counselling platform available to all students at Ontario’s public colleges and universities.
Bandealy, who founded Get A-Head, said in his statement that he was motivated through his PhD work at the University of Toronto “to take a closer look at the structural issues affecting both client access to (mental health) care and the training pipeline for future clinicians.”
“After two years of research and development, it became clear to me that Ontario’s system needed a digital solution capable of improving both,” Bandealy wrote. “That work became Get A-Head.”
After acquiring Get A-Head in 2022, Keel Digital Solutions rebranded the platform as Keel Mind.
Students can log in with their school email address and get matched with a counsellor or eligible trainee — a student registered in a mental health-related post-secondary program, according to the company.
The platform allows students to select what demographics they’re looking for in a counsellor — including gender, age and ethnic background. Then, they can match with a counsellor for virtual sessions.
The technology can allow a supervisor to look in on sessions through what the company describes as a “one-way digital mirror.” As Bandealy explained it, the system “allows clinical supervisors to observe sessions remotely, enabling supervisors to provide more effective guidance while expanding the capacity of training programs.”
Keel Mind also provides feedback generated by artificial intelligence on intangible aspects of the session, such as the rapport and empathy between counsellor and student, and provides an auto-generated transcript.
Ontario’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities’ (MCU) goal in funding it, according to the journal article by Bandealy and other Keel researchers, was to simultaneously train counselling students, while providing counselling to students.
“In the first year of the MCU-funded initiative, the program delivered outcomes far beyond expectations,” wrote Bandealy, who said 40,000-plus mental-health sessions were facilitated in that time.
“Based on this success, the platform expanded to 35 post-secondary institutions, 53 academic programs, and has supported tens of thousands of hours of supervised clinical training,” its founder said.
Keel Digital Solutions’ acquisition of Get A-Head has also been incredibly profitable, according to a video chief operating officer Jay Fischbach recorded in 2023 on the company’s “explosive growth.”
Fischbach talks in the video, which is on YouTube, about how Keel, initially known as Vector Health Laboratories, rapidly acquired a lab and got government contracts to do saliva testing during the pandemic. Then, it became clear the pandemic was coming to an end.
“We were coming up with ideas of how to pivot and where we could get the most margin out of our businesses, and we started talking to this team called Get A-Head,” the COO explained.
Get A-Head was about to close a government contract, and Keel made a deal “to expedite that process, achieve much larger value and much larger margins,” Fischbach said.
“One thing we knew was that if we were to project forward five to 10 years, we won't be saying, ‘Do you remember when mental health was a thing?’ It was right in our windshield, and we had an opportunity to take advantage of that — this company had already been approved for a provincial pilot with the government,” he said.
Pushed by CEO Rob Godfrey “to try all new things,” Keel expanded and outsourced, and lobbied “really hard” with government agencies for addiction counselling, certifying bodies, and peer support groups, Fischbach said.
“We're almost at 31 million in revenue. We've achieved almost 6 million in EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization]. We've hired over 100 team members. We have future funding in terms of contracts for another 50 million bucks, and we've expanded,” Fischbach said.
“We are very, very excited about our future and the future and the future in mental health and what we can provide for that business line.”
—With files from Jack Hauen