Sam Preston joined the paramedic program at CTS Canadian Career College out of a desire to serve his community in a meaningful way. He was considering joining the navy when he learned of the opportunity to train as a paramedic for one year before going on to work in Ontario’s most underserviced regions.
Ontario’s Learn and Stay Grant promised fully funded tuition to students willing to work a minimum of six months in high-need, often rural and remote communities after graduating. The grant, which was introduced to address Ontario's growing shortage of healthcare workers, was paused Oct. 6, when the provincial government placed an indefinite freeze on OSAP to students from private post-secondary institutions.
Preston said he woke up Oct. 7 to learn that he might never receive the money needed to cover his tuition.
“That was absolute devastation," he said.
"Like, absolute sinking feeling, gut punch, want to vomit. Your entire life has been upended, and financial security has been ripped out from underneath you," Preston said.
"And everything you’ve been working towards is potentially or most likely now not going to happen,” he said.
The freeze was instituted following an investigation into suspicious OSAP applications at private career colleges.
The Canadian Press reported that Career Colleges Ontario alerted the Ministry of Colleges and Universities to unusual activity in January 2023. Two years and numerous warnings later, the ministry began an official in-person investigation into one of the colleges in July 2025 and in-person investigations into eight of them in October 2026.
In court documents obtained by The Canadian Press, CCO said 10 schools received an average 855 per cent increase in OSAP applications from 2022 to 2024. One school had an alleged 2,700 per cent increase, to 2,992 from 107 applicants.
In two career colleges, more than half of the financial aid applications allegedly came from a single IP address, according to the court documents.
Three Academy of Learning Career Colleges across the GTA were among the 10 flagged by the CCO. Students from those three campuses received more than $219 million in OSAP grants in 2024-2025, according to The Canadian Press.
The ministry recorded more than 220 tips, referrals and investigations relating to three Academy of Learning campuses since January 2024, Liberal MPP Tyler Watt said at Queen's Park.
These included allegations that recruiters were completing OSAP applications on behalf of students.
“Uploading documents, completing coursework and in some cases, allegedly using OSAP as a registration tool,” Watt said.
The Academy of Learning denies these allegations, which have not been proven, said The Canadian Press.
The Academy of Learning campuses are owned by a parent company, Opulence Education Group. Elections Ontario’s public database shows the three co-founders of Opulence, Puneet Khanna, Harit Gaba and Suhail Seth, donated a total of $11,466 to the Ontario PCs headed by Premier Doug Ford between 2024 and 2025.
Opulence did not respond to these claims, despite repeated attempts to contact them.
Colleges and Universities Minister Nolan Quinn hired a private firm, KPMG, to conduct an audit of OSAP at career colleges in August 2026, brushing aside opposition calls to bring in the provincial auditor general.
Quinn said in a statement that preliminary findings from the audit identified risks around common ownership, ties to immigration firms, weak verification of student enrollment and unusually high OSAP applications from the same area.
When contacted about the audit, KPMG declined to comment, citing its policy on private client matters. Quinn has not committed to publicly releasing the audit's findings.
“It is not clear whether this work has actually started, and the results of that review will only be made available to the government, not to the public. I don’t believe that is good enough. The public deserves to know what is happening here,” Liberal MPP Lee Fairclough said at Queen's Park.
The PC MPPs voted down Fairclough's motion for the Auditor General to conduct an independent audit, which would have made the audit's findings publicly available.
Kari Slade, a teacher at Southern Ontario Dental College, whose students have been subject to the OSAP freeze, said the government is punishing students for its own lack of oversight.
“If you have had a failure in your ability to regulate, that should come down on those specific colleges. A blanket cutting of OSAP funds to thousands of students in Ontario is not the solution,” she said.
Slade said many career colleges have small profit margins, contrary to public perception.
“If you’re trying to make a million dollars, opening a dental hygiene school is probably the most stressful way you could go about that,” she said.
Slade said Ford’s recent cuts to public colleges have led to essential programs shutting down, and private colleges are now filling the gaps. She pointed to Fanshawe College, which she said lost its dental assisting program last year as a direct result of provincial cuts.
“We're actually creating your health-care workers because there are not enough community college placements,” Slade said.
Slade said the government’s approach is paving the path to further privatization.
“This is just one more ploy from the Conservative government to privatize our healthcare and our education. And it’s sick,” Slade said.
She said people don’t realize that prices for health-care services will increase when student dropouts lead to further worker shortages.
CTS student Ashley Comeau said CTS’s paramedic program is already facing a shortage of preceptors, the advanced-care paramedics needed to mentor students before they can graduate.
Approximately 160 students across all three CTS Canadian Career College campuses have dropped out after the Oct. 6 OSAP freeze, a CTS representative said. More than 40 of those students were part of the Stay and Learn grant, they said.
Comeau said she would have been one of those students if it weren't for her husband, who works full time.
“It feels like it's no longer about who’s the best fit to go to school, or become a paramedic in this case. It’s about who can afford it,” she said.
Comeau was planning to work in Moose Factory, an isolated northern community in northern Ontario, who she said is in need of paramedics.
"We just want to help people and it feels like the government is preventing us from doing that," she said.
Preston considers himself fortunate to have found a job at Home Depot, where he now works 30 hours a week in addition to completing his coursework. Like Ashley, his paramedic program comprises of the contents of a two-year program compressed into one accelerated year.
Preston said the additional hours he's working to afford his tuition in the absence of his OSAP will come at the expense of his academic performance.
“I’m going to do worse in the course. It’s going to affect my placements. It’s going to affect my ability to get employment at a hospital,” he said.
“You want the guy with an A, or the person with a ninety-five average, to show up when you have a heart attack,” Preston said.
He said that graduates from his school are embedded in health care across Canada.
“We have a map at the school where our paramedics alone are serving all around this country,” Preston said.
He said people are right to be angry over what has occurred with OSAP and government spending, but the majority of private career colleges are not to blame.
“To paint all schools with the same broad brush as some people who have exploited the system is just not an intelligent way of looking at it. It demands more nuance, just like the response from the government should,” Preston said.
