Last week, the Ford government removed all private post-secondary institutions and their students from the Ontario Student Assistance Plan (OSAP).
asserted
government → remove → Plan
This comes mere weeks after reductions to student grants amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars announced back in February came into effect.
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reductions → come → effect
The provincial government wants you to think these are two different stories, one about “getting tough on fraud” and the other about making OSAP more financially sustainable.
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OSAP → want → fraud
Rather it is a single interconnected tale involving billions of dollars of public money lost to fraud due to the government’s own negligence.
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it → involve → negligence
The story begins back in 2023.
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story → begin → 2023
As a series of court filings and freedom of information requests have now made public, it was at that point that a small handful of private vocational colleges began enrolling huge numbers of new students who required student aid — specifically grants — to attend.
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who → make → aid
The cost of running OSAP rose significantly.
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cost → run → OSAP
By the 2024-25 loan year, spending on student grants had doubled from where it was three years earlier, rising to over a billion dollars in total public spending.
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it → double → spending
We do not have firm data from the 2025-26 year, but according to a government document released last February, expenditure may have gone up another billion that year.
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expenditure → have → document
The government would have been in a position to know that there was something strange going on as far back as 2023.
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government → know → 2023
That’s when Career Colleges Ontario, the body representing most private institutions in the province, says it first went to the government with evidence that a few specific institutions were the site of “suspicious activity.
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institutions → ’ → activity
In the spring of 2025, the federal government, which splits the cost of student aid with the province, started investigating the causes of the rise in spending at a handful of institutions, and expressed concern about some of them to the province of Ontario in September of that year, pointing to potential fraud indicators such as multiple applications being completed by the same person or group, and the fact that many aid recipients appeared not to be students.
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recipients → split → person
On the basis of its own investigation, the federal government asked the provincial government to act.
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government → ask → government
Ontario performed its own inspections of some of these institution in the fall of 2025 and found “students unable to name their institution, program or courses, students unable to communicate in English and students claiming to attend classes in person despite being enrolled in asynchronous online programs.”
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Ontario → perform → programs
But the provincial government did nothing to restrict these institutions’ access to the program.
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government → do → program
Because the federal and provincial governments jointly run student aid in Canada, these hundreds of millions of dollars in extra grant expenditures were costing Ottawa money, too.
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hundreds → run → money
The Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP) wanted to kick these institutions out of its program — but since institutional inclusion is the prerogative of the provinces it was unable to do so.
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it → want → provinces
Therefore, in the November 2025 federal budget, Ottawa did the only thing it was permitted to do — get rid of all private institutions from the CSFAP.
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it → do → CSFAP
This left the Ontario government with a problem: it would have to pick up the federal government’s share of the now-humongous bill for that handful of private colleges.
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it → leave → colleges
The logical move here would have been to get to the heart of the problem and remove the problematic institutions from student aid eligibility.
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move → get → eligibility
It chose not to do that.
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It → choose → that
Instead, in February 2026, it chose to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to students at all institutions, not just the problem ones.
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it → choose → institutions
At the time Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn claimed this was necessary for “sustainability and balance for the program,” and the Premier specifically implied that students themselves were to blame for rising program costs because they were “taking basket-weaving courses” and “going out and buying fancy watches and cologne.”
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they → claim → watches
That is to say, it chose to ignore strong evidence of malfeasance at particular colleges that it knew were responsible for explosive increases in grant expenditures, and it punished ordinary students instead.
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it → say → students
This spring, the government finally suspended the allegedly malfeasant institutions from the student aid program.
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government → suspend → program
But then last week, it did something else: it cut off all private post-secondary institutions from all student aid, including loans.
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it → do → loans
That’s tens of thousands of perfectly legitimate students at perfectly legitimate institutions who suddenly are cut off from aid, and likely unable to finish their program.
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who → ’ → program
It’s also hundreds of institutions which are now in financial danger.
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which → ’ → danger
The government provided no evidence to suggest that private sector institutions apart from the ones already suspended were in any sense a problem.
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institutions → provide → sense
In sum: while the Ontario government wants you to think it is getting tough on fraud in the Ontario Student Aid program, the truth is that it spent at least two years doing everything but that.
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it → want → that
And while it did, eventually, suspend a number of institutions from the program for fraud and involve the Ontario Provincial Police, for no reason at all it also suspended hundreds of private institutions from the program and made students at public institutions hundreds of millions of dollars poorer.
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students → suspend → dollars
The February OSAP cuts, and the October suspension of private colleges not implicated in the scandal are both acts of political theatre, and arguably distract from the government’s desperately incompetent handling of the file.
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cuts → implicate → file
Both need to be reversed immediately.
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Both → need → ?
The Aporia
