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 is suing a company in the middle of its Skills Development Fund scandal, claiming it defrauded the province of tens of millions of dollars through a co-ordinated conspiracy.
Ontario is seeking $25.9 million back from Get A-Head, a mental health platform provider, its parent company Keel Digital Solutions and a handful of its executives, according to a statement of claim that Premier Doug Ford’s office says was recently filed.
The government alleges in its claim that Get A-Head “committed fraud” by misrepresenting its platform’s usage and “conspired to further the fraud and obfuscate it” by failing to comply with provincial investigations.
An executive for Keel Digital Solutions said the government’s lawsuit is “deeply flawed, built on misstatements and outright inaccuracies.”
“Keel Digital has never been involved in any fraudulent activity, and we fully expect the government of Ontario to be compelled to retract its claims, apologize, and answer for the recklessness and malice that drove this case,” wrote Jay Fischbach, the company’s chief operating officer, in an email. “We caution the media to be careful with their reporting, an accusation is not proof of anything. A counterclaim is forthcoming.”
Most of the lawsuit is over $30 million the Ministry of Colleges and Universities paid Get A-Head to deliver virtual mental health-care sessions to college and university students. Get A-Head, which is owned and controlled by Keel Digital Solutions, also received millions more public dollars from the Ford government’s Skills Development Fund (SDF) to make its platform available to train first responders to be “peer supporters” for their colleagues.
The province’s court filing says it agreed to increase Get A-Head’s funding under the impression the company was exceeding targeted service levels, with the government going on to allege that in reality, Get A-Head’s numbers concerning how many therapy sessions for students it had facilitated were “false and overstated.”
According to the statement of claim, Get A-Head defrauded the government by, among other things, counting 20-minute increments of students’ mental health-care sessions as separate ones, vastly inflating the number of reportable sessions to increase its compensation. The provincial government also claims the company “improperly retained” over $5 million in taxpayer funds, $1.4 million of which it labelled as “company profit.”
Keel also “reported plainly ineligible expenses as part of their budgets … such as first-class airfare, international office space, and fine dining, which they hid in generic line items and presented as eligible project costs,” the government’s statement of claim says.
The alleged fraud came to light through a provincial forensic audit that began in 2024, according to the province’s court filing. The timing of the forensic audit means that the Ford government agreed to give Get A-Head $4.8 million from the Skills Development Fund months into its internal investigation. According to the statement of claim, Get A-Head and the Ministry of Labour reached that funding agreement on March 31, 2025. The government’s internal forensic audit team completed its work in early November 2025.
The audit also “identified possible conflicts of interest,” the statement of claim reads.
Keel embroiled in SDF scandal for months
The suit adds to an already messy situation between Keel and the Ford government, which has escalated over the last few months in tandem with the Skills Development Fund scandal.
Keel’s been central to the government controversy since it sparked in the fall. In early October, Ontario’s auditor general released a report describing the SDF as “not fair, transparent or accountable,” including because of labour ministers’ selection of “lower-scoring” applicants.
Days later, Labour Minister David Piccini — who has final say over the fund’s recipients — was in Paris, France, at the wedding of Keel’s then-lobbyist, Michael Rudderham.
Years earlier — in January 2023, several months before Ford made Piccini the province’s labour minister — he’d been photographed in rinkside seats at a Toronto Maple Leafs game with one of Keel’s directors.
In the same week in early October that The Trillium first reported on the wedding and Leafs game, Piccini said in a radio interview that he had personally been involved in selecting “lower-scoring” applicants, and that Keel was a “lower-scoring” SDF recipient.
While Piccini has said he covered his own costs to the lobbyist’s wedding and the Leafs game, both outings were central to ethics complaints opposition parties filed to the province’s integrity commissioner, prompting an investigation her office confirmed late last year.
Ontario’s NDP has also asked the integrity commissioner’s office to look into whether Rudderham broke the province’s lobbying rules. Neither he nor the Keel director who attended the Leafs game with Piccini was named in the government’s statement of claim.
The forensic audit that the government’s statement of claim relies on has also led to a police investigation into Keel. Shortly after the audit concluded in early November, the Ford government sent its findings to the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). The OPP confirmed a month ago that it had launched an investigation, with a spokesperson for it explaining in an email that while it was “initiated based on the referral of concerning transfer payments from the Ministry of Colleges (and) Universities … the scope may evolve as new information becomes available.”
Since early November, when The Trillium first reported that the Ford government contacted the OPP about Keel, the company has pushed back against the province. It has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, claiming the Ford government has made it the “scapegoat” for the controversy around the SDF.
The government noted this in its statement of claim, saying “the Defendants showed no remorse, criticized the Crown in public media statements, and persisted in repeating substantially the same misleading, incomplete and uncooperative responses that had earlier stymied the Crown’s investigation.”
How the fraud allegedly unfolded
Ontario signed three annual agreements with Get A-Head for its higher education mental health support, from 2022 to 2024, totalling $22.5 million.
At the end of each agreement, Get A-Head reported that it spent almost exactly as much as the maximum potential provincial payment it could receive, according to the statement of claim.
The province alleges the company did this by massively inflating the number of sessions it provided — claiming, for example, that it ran 74,550 sessions in 2023-24, when in fact it held only 5,430 — and providing only “budget estimates” in its yearly reports instead of a detailed breakdown of expenses.
Get A-Head also multiplied the number of hours of mental health care provided by the number of people in each session, the government alleges.
The defendants also included “any time that institutional licences logged on the Platform as a
‘session’ without any regard to what the time was spent doing,” the government says.
Ontario alleges that “approximately 50 per cent of the actual time logged on the Platform was for ineligible activities.”
Defendants also earned and “hid” from the government a total of nearly $27,000 in credit card reward points from expenses paid with provincial funding, the statement of claim adds.
The province claims Keel leadership also failed to tell the government about more than $668,000 in interest, tax rebates and credits, which would have affected their funding amount.
Moreover, the defendants “conspired” among themselves to keep the fraud going by refusing to comply with the two provincial audits, claims the government.
Three Get A-Head leaders consistently claimed “they simply reported the number of sessions that were logged on the Platform by Trainee licensees,” and “intentionally concealed that their reports included duplicate time, overlapping time, and reported each 20-minute increment of time as a unique session,” the government alleges.
They also falsely claimed that due to health privacy laws, they couldn’t give investigators information that would have let them accurately review Keel’s data, the government says.
Opposition accuses government of ‘cover-up’
In a written statement on Friday, NDP Leader Marit Stiles said Ontario taxpayers are “footing the bill” for the government’s mistakes, and that Premier Ford should “fire” Piccini as labour minister.
“Doling out millions of taxpayer dollars to such a shady company can only be explained by preferential treatment,” she said in a statement.
In his own statement, Liberal parliamentary leader John Fraser accused Ford of using the lawsuit as a “cover-up.”
Fraser added that “the timing is not accidental,” accusing the Ford government of announcing the lawsuit on a Friday, against a “company already under investigation by the OPP, one that it gave money to after it was flagged for a forensic audit because the minister of labour intervened on behalf of his personal friend.”
Fraser also characterized the move as a distraction from the wider Skills Development Fund scandal, noting that the government made “no effort” to recoup public funds given to Facedrive, a company fined by the Ontario Securities Commission for allegedly misleading investors.
“Instead, that same individual’s company later received additional money from the Skills Development Fund,” the Liberal MPP said.
The Skills Development Fund “has become a vehicle for rewarding well-connected insiders,” Fraser continued, also calling on Ford to strip Piccini of his ministership.
“We know public money went to the Ford family dentist, to executives who misled the government, to the owner of a strip club, and to well-connected Tory lobbyists. These decisions were not based on merit but connections alone,” he said.
“Doug Ford now wants Ontarians to believe his government was swindled. They were not swindled. They were caught.”