Ontario Labour Minister David Piccini's office has been heavily involved in selecting projects that get funded under a $2.5-billion skills training program and has doled out money to applicants ranked low by bureaucrats without documenting reasons, the auditor general has found.
The Skills Development Fund gives money to organizations for projects that help hire, train or retrain workers.
More than half of the projects Piccini's office gave funding to were ranked by bureaucrats as poor, low or medium against the program's goals and criteria, with those projects receiving about $742 million over the first five rounds of funding, Shelley Spence found.