You may have heard of the province of Ontario’s ‘pausing’ OSAP payments in the middle of this current semester. For those who may not know, OSAP is the ‘Ontario Student Assistance Program’, offering grants and non-or-low interest loans to needy students to complete their degrees. This sudden ‘pause’ has left many students in the lurch, unable to pay for tuition, food, rent and many other necessities.
Like so many government programs of late, it has been seriously abused by various Potemkin ‘career colleges’, many of them on-line, with dubious curricula, whose ‘students’ – in the words of an 80’s rock ballad – ‘took the money and ran’. This is not unconnected with the ongoing immigration problem, for fake student visas are an easy way to enter the country. And the abuse of OSAP has funded this malfeasance. It is alleged the government has known of this for years, allowing many millions of dollars to be frittered away.
To get some idea of the scale of the corruption, here is a report alleging that thousands of applications came from a single IP address, a certain ‘Academy of Learning’ and one or two others:
There were 6,001 OSAP applications from students at the Brampton East campus for the 2025-26 year and 3,136 of them — 52 per cent — came from a single IP address, the ministry alleges. There were five more IP addresses responsible for 100 or more applications, they allege.
At the North York campus, 3,460 out of 6,070 OSAP applications for that year — 57 per cent — came from a single IP address, the ministry alleges. Two other IP addresses were responsible for another 255 applications, they allege.
The Bay campus saw 6,966 OSAP applications that year, with 1,736 — 25 per cent — coming from a single IP address, the ministry alleges. Five other IP addresses submitted 100 or more applications, they allege.
Why didn’t someone flag this egregious abuse before? We should have no problem with turning off the spigot to these ‘schools’, which should be shut down forthwith, but the problem here is that good and faithful colleges, particularly Redeemer University in Ancaster and Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College, where I happen to teach, have been lumped together with the rest. Both are fully accredited, degree-granting institutions, providing complete audits, student numbers; they have always complied with OSAP requirements, and over the years have produced a superlative education in the liberal arts and other subjects, and an impressive list of alumni.
Dr. Patrick Craine, the president of Seat of Wisdom College, says that the government “began an audit of private career colleges in the summer, and we have heard that there was some openness initially to separate out so-called ‘low risk’ institutions. However, they ultimately chose to treat the whole private post-secondary sector in an undifferentiated way despite the clear differences in organizational structures and regulatory frameworks”. The official response on the college’s webpage may be found here.
Now, we should all be for subsidiarity and less reliance upon the government, but this is our money they’re dealing with, not theirs, and is manifestly unjust, both to the colleges and their students. The funds were promised, relied upon and then summarily refused right in the middle of the semester, all due to what seems a few very bad actors.
Without some amelioration of this situation, both face grave difficulty, in terms of their financial situation, as well as keeping and recruiting students, and the future is uncertain.
If you feel so called, please do write or call your MPP in support of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom and Redeemer. We need such private and independent colleges, as an alternative to the government-funded and monolithic large universities – about whose deleterious influence much could be said.
The freedom of such colleges – especially our own Catholic one, the only Newman-guide approved college in Canada – is necessary, so they may continue their mission to educate and form students in the fullness of truth, for the future of our Church, our country, and the world.
