The Ontario government’s OSAP controversy could compound into a bigger political problem. The Prime Minister’s asking for sacrifices may be more asking younger Canadians to bite off more than they are willing to chew.
ONTARIO
OSAP ASAP
It’s been a little over two weeks since Queen’s Park’s return, and the Ford government is dealing with a major headache. The Premier has long presented himself as a steward of taxpayer dollars, going all the way back to his crusade against the “gravy train” at Toronto City Hall, but the latest OSAP (Ontario Student Assistance Program) controversy and questions surrounding the Skills Development Fund risk feeding into one another, turning separate controversies into a much larger political problem. These instances differ in their circumstances and outcomes, but together they leave the Premier vulnerable to opposition attacks on the government’s judgment, oversight and accountability. Ultimately, they raise questions about whether the government is exercising the financial discipline that households are forced to practise under their own financial pressures.
The warning signs over misuse, and now alleged fraud, of OSAP were known as far back as 2023 when Career Colleges Ontario shared concerns about potentially suspicious activity with the government. Career Colleges Ontario’s flagging of these activities, of course, doesn’t mean the government knew the full extent of the problem at the time, but it establishes how far back the concerns went.
Court records obtained by The Canadian Press revealed that the Brampton East and Bay Street campuses of the Academy of Learning were given inspection notices in October 2024. In January 2025, Career Colleges Ontario again identified ten specific schools that had irregularities, including the two campuses mentioned above where OSAP applications had grown by 527% and 642% respectively, while growth was relatively flat across most career colleges in Ontario. The oversight concern is that those site visits didn’t begin until July and August 2025, after these campuses’ eligibility for OSAP was renewed.
At the same Brampton East and Bay Street campuses, the ministry later alleged that thousands of OSAP applications originated from single IP addresses, accounting for 52% of applications at Brampton East and 25% at Bay Street. The schools disputed the implications, and the allegations have not been proven in court.
It wasn’t until May of this year that the Ministry took targeted action by issuing notices of nonrenewal to six campuses, subsequently suspending their OSAP eligibility. KPMG was hired this past August to conduct a broader audit of OSAP applications at private postsecondary institutions after additional concerns about suspicious activity were raised.
It was nearly four years after the first warnings that Minister of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security Nolan Quinn ordered an October freeze of all OSAP payments associated with private postsecondary institutions while KPMG’s work was ongoing. Preliminary findings identified suspicious patterns and irregularities, including a lack of verification of student enrolment and academic outcomes. Some career colleges had links to immigration services firms. Earlier this week, Minister Quinn announced proposed measures to strengthen safeguards and hold colleges accountable, including requiring schools to verify student eligibility, class participation and coursework completion; making courses and programs that are mainly online ineligible; restricting ties between career colleges, immigration consultants and recruitment companies; and providing the province with more powers to recover funding by making colleges liable for their students’ loans.
It’s not the government’s proposed response to the OSAP controversy that’s at issue. More oversight, safeguards and preventative measures are welcome, expected, appropriate. It is the fact that concerns were flagged by Career Colleges Ontario, yet inspections were delayed and the campuses’ OSAP eligibility was renewed before inspectors recorded failing findings. This raises questions about how the government spends, protects and accounts for taxpayer dollars, with political downside for the government and upside for the opposition. Unfortunately for the government, these questions extend beyond OSAP.
The opposition has been consistently dogging the Ford government on the OSAP issue just as it did on SDF. Although their attacks centre around the impacts on students, the NDP are also challenging the Premier on his own terms: respect for taxpayer dollars. The Premier cannot always be responding to accusations of poor judgement, lack of oversight, and limited accountability mechanisms only after problems emerge. He would be wise to account for the decisions that came before things snowball into questions about his leadership. Otherwise, his opposition has an opening to ask the public a question he may have difficulty answering: is his government living up to the standard he has long demanded of others?
FEDERAL
Some Sacrifices
Two weeks before Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne tabled the 2025 federal budget, the Prime Minister gave a speech at the University of Ottawa before a crowd of faculty, administration, and students. The Prime Minister spoke about all the major themes that defined his government’s focus, including economic independence by diversifying trade, nation-building by approving major infrastructure projects faster, and asserting Canada’s national sovereignty. He also spoke about spending restraint, arguing federal spending had grown faster than the economy. He spoke about trade-offs, making it clear government would have to “do less of some of the things we want to do” to prioritize economic transformation. And he spoke about sacrifice.
In his remarks about sacrifice, the Prime Minister was direct: “to be clear, we won’t transform our economy easily or in a few months; it will take some sacrifices, and it will take some time.” Although not exclusively directed toward the young people in the crowd, one does not need to strain themselves to draw a connection between his comments about sacrifices and his perspective on the prospects of Canada’s youth, saying “your future will not be the same as my past” and adding that his youth “was a time of optimism, of hope, and of promise.” Some would say that is a rather bleak thing for a public official to say, both for its implicit assessment of the country’s economy and because the nation’s youth had already sacrificed enough over the preceding ten years.
It has been well established in study after study that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to dramatically ramp up immigration had, and is arguably continuing to have, a dramatic impact on housing, infrastructure, public services, and employment, with Canada’s youth feeling an acute impact of those policies.
To put Trudeau’s policies into perspective, a March 2024 Statistics Canada report documented a 3.2% increase in Canada’s population in 2023. That’s 1.27 million people in a single year, the fastest annual growth since 1957, 97.6% of which was a result of international migration. The country added another 744,000 in 2024, with international migration accounting for 97.3% of the increase. Non-permanent residents were approximately 3.02 million by January 2025 and 483,640 permanent residents were added in his final full year in office, 78% more than were admitted in 2015.
These policies impacted younger generations in a myriad of ways, but most significantly there was more competition for entry-level jobs as the youth labour force, ages 15 to 24, grew by 3.8%, or 115,000, over the year to August 2024. Sixty percent of that increase came from youth who were neither Canadian-born nor landed immigrants, principally temporary residents. Moreover, the labour supply kept growing while hiring weakened. Vacancies requiring less than one year of experience fell 33.8%, from 427,060 in the second quarter of 2023 to 282,745 in the second quarter of 2024. Full-time employment among Canadian-born youth fell 3% over the year to August 2024, while the overall youth labour force expanded. Teenagers and students especially faced higher unemployment and fewer summer employment opportunities. Unemployment among 15- to 19-year-olds increased from 15.0% in August 2023 to 19.6% in August 2024. Overall youth unemployment reached 14.5%, compared with 5.4% among workers aged 25 to 54. The employment rate among returning students was 46.8% in June 2024, down from 53.7% in June 2022. Excluding pandemic years, it was the lowest June rate since 1998.
The housing market was about as stressed for young Canadians as the job market. The Bank of Canada’s 2024 report, “How Newcomers Impact the Canadian Economy,” found that new housing starts struggled to keep up with demand as immigration-driven population growth was adding pressure to housing prices and rents, especially in major markets like Toronto and Vancouver. Two years prior to the release of the report, roughly one-third of young people reconsidered buying a home or moving to a new rental because of rising prices. The impact was material. The share of 25- to 29-year-old homeowners had fallen from 39.6% in 2016 to 36.5% in 2021. The homeownership rate among 30- to 34-year-olds dropped from 55.0% to 52.3%. Your likelihood of homeownership was associated with parental property ownership. Among adults born in the 1990s, those with parents who were homeowners were more than twice as likely to own property compared to those whose parents did not, 17.4% to 8.1% respectively. Of course, the youth job market and chronic housing shortages should not be solely attributed to the intense increase in immigration during the Trudeau years, but rapid population growth weakened economic prospects for young Canadians and added demand to a housing market already failing younger Canadians.
Carney recognized the political liabilities Trudeau’s immigration policies created when he took over and continued some of the late-Trudeau-era reversals by setting permanent-resident admissions at 380,000 annually for 2026 to 2028. He also set targets for new temporary-resident admissions at 385,000 in 2026 and 370,000 in 2027 and 2028. Those temporary-resident figures cover new student and worker arrivals.
While these policies were well received as a step in the right direction towards getting immigration back under control, his measures in Budget 2026 could mean less relief than those earlier changes promised.
Although he plans to keep the 380,000 permanent-resident target, Budget 2026 will allow more people to obtain permanent-resident status outside that target. According to the Globe and Mail’s estimate, approximately 662,000 people could receive permanent residence in 2027: the regular 380,000 target, up to 200,000 additional conversions, and approximately 82,000 remaining places from last year’s special initiatives. Of course, 662,000 permanent-residency grants do not mean 662,000 new arrivals. Many recipients already live here. Approximately half of the additional 200,000 would be selected through economic pathways; the remainder would address humanitarian and family-related cases. They are not all construction workers or tradespeople. The criticism is that putting their conversions outside the regular target could leave more regular admission spaces available for people arriving from abroad, increasing population growth above what would otherwise occur.
Increasing immigration in the way Prime Minister Carney is proposing risks a severe political backlash from youth who lived through the Trudeau years and are now ten years older, as well as younger generations who are becoming economically productive with fewer economic prospects.
To be clear, it’s not the granting of permanent residency itself that would have negative impacts on the job market or housing demand. Those impacts potentially come in the form of fewer temporary residents departing the country or more arrivals than previously expected. This could intensify competition for entry-level or lower-wage jobs. Employers may also be less inclined to offer higher wages if there are workers readily available, limiting younger people’s earning potential. Lastly, the path to homeownership becomes even steeper if fewer people are leaving and construction cannot keep pace with the added demand for long-term housing.
Carney seemed to be prepared to deliver some relief for young people early in his tenure in the form of targeted, incremental changes to immigration that were intended to restore the balance between economic considerations and the capacity of public services and infrastructure and the availability of housing. By pivoting towards a more liberalized immigration policy, he risks asking younger Canadians to make more sacrifices before they have seen relief from the last round. Carney told the students their future would not be the same as his past. Fair enough. But they are entitled to ask how much more they are expected to give up, and when their own time for optimism, hope, and promise will come.
Christopher Mourtos, writing on behalf of ONpoint Strategy Group
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