EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Dozens of the earliest recipients of the Skills Development Fund received follow-up grants from Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, despite their initial taxpayer-funded program falling well short of what they agreed to.
When the Ford government launched the Skills Development Fund (SDF) in 2021, it provided about $177 million to labour groups, not-for-profits, companies and municipalities to train or upskill workers, or help keep them employed. Before receiving a slice of the funding, the almost 150 recipients signed deals with the government that included various “standard performance commitments,” which they were supposed to collect data on and later share with the Ministry of Labour for it to use to evaluate the success of programs it gave taxpayer funds to.
Most recipients — 133 of 146 — of first-round SDF grants followed through with sharing this information with the ministry, according to data obtained by The Trillium.
Of the groups that provided data about their programs to the ministry, 55 reported that they’d failed to reach 50 per cent of one of three main “performance commitments” that they’d agreed to — which includes their targeted participants, participants who completed their program, and participants who became employed within 60 days of finishing it. The labour minister’s office, under the leadership of Monte McNaughton or David Piccini, later decided to give 35 of these groups more funding from later rounds of the Skills Development Fund.
Five of the 13 recipients that didn’t provide the government with data about their program after its completion also later received more SDF funding.
In response to questions about a number of the recipients that fell short of their training or employment targets, a spokesperson for Piccini wrote, “All SDF applications are reviewed and evaluated by ministry officials using a standardized public evaluation framework.”
“We continue to strengthen evaluation methods and introduced new criteria to ensure recipients can deliver high-quality training,” added Michel Figueredo, director of communications to Piccini. “This includes reviewing the selection process after each round to determine which objectives need to be updated to reflect current economic needs and what measures are required to encourage participation from priority sectors and target demographics.”
The data collected by the Ministry of Labour showing how recipients of the first round of the Skills Development Fund met — or failed to meet — their “standard performance commitments” was obtained using the freedom-of-information system. The Trillium has made it available to the public here.
Since 2021, the Skills Development Fund has become one of Premier Doug Ford and his party’s favourite initiatives. The Progressive Conservative government has awarded over $1.3 billion of taxpayer funds in 1,000-plus grants to hundreds of recipients over the last five years.
The Labour Ministry funding program, however, has become the subject of intense controversy at Queen’s Park. In a series of articles since early September, The Trillium has publicized numerous revelations about connections that many SDF recipients share with the PCs, including with the premier and both labour ministers who’ve been in charge of the program.
Auditor general Shelley Spence also released a report at the beginning of this month, which has helped fuel the controversy. The auditor revealed that under both labour ministers who’ve overseen the SDF, their office selected its recipients. In hundreds of cases, it passed over applicants that non-partisan public servants gave “high” scores to, in favour of lower-ranked proposals. In many cases, Spence found, the labour minister’s office provided either no explanation for why it gave funds to certain applicants, or “rationales (that) did not always address evaluation concerns or seem accurate.”
The minister’s office’s selection of who to provide Skills Development Fund grants to has, overall, been “not fair, transparent or accountable,” Spence concluded.
When McNaughton left Ford’s cabinet and elected politics altogether a couple of years ago, the premier replaced him with Piccini, who has overseen — and, he’s said, personally helped choose — the recipients of the last two rounds of the SDF. Through these rounds, over 400 training grants totalling almost $600 million were given out to groups by the Labour Ministry.
McNaughton was in charge of the Skills Development Fund for its first three rounds. With him in charge, his office awarded just under 600 grants totalling about $736 million in total.
The Ministry of Labour began accepting applications for the first round of the Skills Development Fund about a year into the pandemic and described it then as being “specifically designed to address the (economic) challenges brought on by COVID-19.”
In her office’s report, the province’s auditor highlighted three main key performance indicators (KPIs) that the Labour Ministry has used to evaluate SDF recipients’ programs, which include how many participants they had, how many participants completed the project, and how many became employed 60 days after completion — compared to the amounts they committed to.
As the auditor also reported, her office found that 76 per cent of first-round SDF recipients met or surpassed their targeted number of participants, 90 per cent achieved their participant-completion target, and 58 per cent exceeded their participant-employment target.
On the day that her office released its findings about the Skills Development Fund, Spence told reporters that it had also learned that although the Ministry of Labour did “spot checks” of the data that recipients provided it about their programs, it hadn’t all been independently verified.
The Trillium attempted to reach multiple groups that fell short in their SDF round one-funded programs of their key targets, but didn’t hear back from any before this story was published.
Parties battle over SDF’s depiction
Since MPPs returned to the legislature a couple of weeks ago for the fall sitting, the Skills Development Fund controversy has been the dominant topic of discussion. Every day in question period, opposition MPPs from the NDP and Liberals have taken Piccini to task over his and his predecessor’s funding decisions — while maintaining, as well, that they support the program’s concept.
Piccini has been unrelenting about his faith in the initiative and continuing it without needing to make significant changes to how funding decisions are made, while respecting the auditor general’s advice.
The two sides — the Ford government and the parties in opposition — have essentially been having different conversations.
NDP and Liberal MPPs have been critical of the Skills Development Fund’s use, characterizing it as the latest way Ford’s PCs have used the powers of the government to reward their friends and political allies.
Day after day, NDP and official Opposition Leader Marit Stiles has raised Piccini’s rinkside Leafs game outing with a director of a company his office later awarded SDF funds to, and whose lobbyist the labour minister recently attended the Parisian wedding of, both of which were first reported by The Trillium.
MPP John Fraser, the Ontario Liberals’ parliamentary leader, repeatedly asked Piccini at a legislative committee meeting on Wednesday to say he’s “never going to do this again,” referring to the same pair of events.
Piccini has said little regarding the Leafs game and wedding, except for saying he’s covered his costs for both. Asked multiple times whether he’s set up a formal ethics screen, as cabinet ministers can do in co-operation with the integrity commissioner’s office, with the company director or lobbyist from either of those events, Piccini wouldn’t say.
The labour minister has tended to dodge many other questions about the other SDF recipients that The Trillium and other media outlets have revealed share connections with him and others in the PC government. Oftentimes, he’s pivoted to talking about the funding program’s successive stories. Among those is that of Baseer Ahmed, who participated in home-building training that not-for-profit group Aspire for Higher provided, thanks to $4.5 million that Piccini’s office awarded it.
During a visit to the legislature and to meet with Piccini this week, Ahmed told The Trillium, “If it was not for the opportunity that Aspire for Higher created for me, I would not have been able to eventually secure a full-time job as a carpenter.”
“In all honesty, without Aspire for Higher, I very much possibly may have been out on the street,” Ahmed added.