Critics continue to question the provincial government’s $1.3 billion Skills Development Fund (SDF), a fund that saw Durham College (DC) receive almost $800,000 through a contract with FIRST Robotics this year.
It is one of three community partners that received funding from the SDF training stream, a provincial grant under scrutiny after a report from the auditor general said the fund was administered in a way that was “not fair, transparent, or accountable.”
According to Jean Choi, vice-president of Academic and Students at DC, the college supported and delivered training sessions for FIRST Robotics Canada, Ajax Fire, and Blue Door over the past year.
She said they were mainly delivered by the Faculty of Skilled Trades and Apprenticeship and the Corporate Training Services Team (CTS).
FIRST Robotics received $798,000 to access the college’s carpentry facilities at the Whitby campus to train secondary school teachers from across Kawartha, Durham and York Region, “various skills that they can then weave back into the lessons within their own curriculum,” said Choi.
In spring, she said DC delivered to 18 Ajax Fire first responders a two-day “hands-on emergency elevator rescue training session.”
If not for this partnership, Choi said, first responders wouldn’t have been able to access these simulations.
She highlighted this was only possible because of the “great facilities” at DC.
“Given that we’ve got an elevating devices program and the infrastructure to support that, we leverage that,” she said.
Blue Door and DC partnered through the CONSTRUCT program, giving people “who were facing barriers to full-time employment within the skilled trades” a three-week summer training program.
According to Choi, the program helped 20 participants “transition them to independent and profitable employment in the construction industry.”
Choi said she isn’t aware of what kind of due diligence was required to track the funding and its impact because she didn’t participate in the negotiation.
Similarly, she said she can’t share outcome or impact results as “that wouldn’t be for us to track,” but rather to the partners that she highlighted “are very well known in the community and in their industry.”
She clarified she was not worried about the lack of due diligence.
“I’m actually very proud of the partnerships with Blue Door and with Ajax Fire and First Robotics,” said Choi.
Thomas McMorrow, an associate professor of legal studies at Ontario Tech University, said the Minister of Labour’s office interfered with a “pretty good system of assessing applications” by overriding evaluations by civil servants and instead, as the auditor general noted, assigning the funds to projects ranked poor, low and medium, without documentation or proper explanations.
Opposition NDP leader Marit Stiles has now asked the integrity commissioner to investigate.
McMorrow said several provisions of the Members’ Integrity Act may have been infringed by minister David Piccinis’s office, which “seems to be a pattern.”
“The standards are there. It’s a question of, are our democratically elected political representatives holding themselves and being held by the electorate to these standards?” he said.
The integrity commissioner will now have to “determine whether it’s worth” investigating the complaint raised by the NDP leader, he said.
If it is, he said Cathryn Motherwell would then conduct an inquiry, which could result in a range from no penalty to removing Piccini from office.
If she finds ”something that the police needs to investigate,” McMorrow said she will hand it off to them.
Piccini and his ministry have agreed to four recommendations in the auditor general’s report; however, they are not binding.
McMorrow said it ultimately depends on having a stronger opposition and voters.
“If Ontarians don’t care, then the government won’t care either,” he said.