HESA: The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up
2026/10/14 Leave a comment
Yet another example of mismanagement:
| ….The first part I know for sure – it’s how the federal government got drawn into this mess and also why it eventually cut all private institutions out of the grants systems in last year’s federal budget (something I wrote about back here before I had any of this context). The feds don’t have the power to cut out any single institution from the program (only provinces have that), and so the feds spent most of 2025 asking Ontario “what the hell is going on in those institutions”? And when they were fobbed off with various weak-ass answers (”it’s a post-COVID thing…online education is big now, we shouldn’t try to stifle innovation…”), the feds pulled the plug. So, important data point here: the feds knew there was something bad in a specific few institutions over a year ago and asked the province to do something. The province chose not to act. The second part, re: the nature of the scam, I don’t know for sure. Details will presumably come out in county at some point: Allison Jones of the Canadian Press published some juicy preliminary tidbits about ten days ago. But just for now, assume that something was happening, something bad enough that Career Colleges Ontario (CCO), the association which represents private post-secondary institutions in Ontario, was moved to tell the government – “we have bad actors in our sector and you need to act”. We know this is the case because the government said so in its press release last week. But again, check the date. CCO did this in January 2025. So why did it take so long for the province to move? |
| (I assume there are journalists out there looking at political contributions made by the owners of these institutions. This work will be helpful in understanding provincial government motivations). One might try to excuse the government’s lengthy time-to-get-off-its-ass by saying “oh that’s just the speed of government, it never does anything quickly.” But this is not true. The government may have waited until this summer to move against bad actor private colleges, but it used the crisis to attack students and OSAP itself much earlier…. |
Source: The Contemptible OSAP Cover-Up
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