November 28, 2025.
A company linked to Doug Ford’s family dentist has received about $2 million from Ontario’s controversial Skills Development Fund, one of the few dentistry‑focused firms to tap into this multi‑billion‑dollar pot of “job training” money. It is yet another reminder that in Ontario, the people who most need grants rarely get them, while those closest to power keep striking gold.
Cronyism dressed up as “skills”
Ontario’s auditor general has already found that the Skills Development Fund was “not fair, transparent or accountable,” with the labour minister’s office overriding professional rankings more than half the time to steer around $750 million in grants. Lower‑scoring projects backed by lobbyists and politically connected players routinely leapfrogged higher‑scoring applications from ordinary organizations that followed the rules.
In this environment, a dentist whose practice boasts of treating the Ford family is not just another entrepreneur but a VIP at the public money buffet. Meanwhile, small businesses and founders without lobbyists or personal ties are told their carefully built proposals “do not meet the criteria,” with no data, no explanation, and no appeal.
The invisible cost of “grant theatre”
When people think about grants, they picture the cheque, not the machinery behind it. But programs like the Skills Development Fund are run by well‑paid public servants whose salaries, benefits, and perks show up on Ontario’s Sunshine List if they cross $100,000. What you never see is a simple line item: how many staff it takes to administer each grant stream, what that costs, and how much money is burned on bureaucracy before a single dollar reaches a worker or founder.
More than 377,000 public‑sector employees earned over $100,000 in 2024 alone, with billions in total compensation. Yet the small business owner who spends weeks assembling an application is given a canned rejection and no information about who beat them, how they scored, or why a lower‑ranked but better‑connected project was quietly waved through.
Transparency should mean more than a press release
Yes, Ontario publishes lists of some successful Skills Development Fund projects and a searchable database of high‑earning public employees. But that is transparency in fragments, designed to look open while leaving citizens in the dark about how decisions are actually made.
Real transparency would include, for every grant program:
A full list of funded organizations, amounts, and purposes in machine‑readable form.
An anonymized breakdown of all applicants, their scores, and the cut‑off lines.
The number of staff assigned to the program, their total compensation, and the annual cost of travel, conferences, and other perks charged to that fund.
A requirement to disclose when applicants hired registered lobbyists or had direct contact with a minister’s office before approval.
The auditor general’s report already shows that lobbyist‑backed projects drew tens of millions in SDF money, creating what she called an appearance of preferential treatment for insiders. If governments are proud of their “investments,” they should have no problem letting the public follow every dollar from cabinet office to final recipient.
Small businesses deserve better than a rigged game
The cruel joke is that the businesses most in need of support, bootstrapped founders, experimental educators, women in tech, rural innovators, are told to “apply for grants” that function more like a loyalty rewards program for the well‑connected. The process drains their time, exposes their ideas, and leaves them with nothing but a rejection form letter while millions flow to friends of the government.
At this point, many entrepreneurs would rather see these slush‑fund‑style programs shut down than continue pretending they are merit‑based opportunities for everyone. If public money is going to be spent, taxpayers deserve radical transparency: who gets funded, who gets rejected, who runs the programs, how much they are paid, and whether any of it actually improves people’s lives.
Until that happens, stories about Doug Ford’s dentist getting millions are not outliers. They are the logical outcome of an opaque system that rewards proximity to power and punishes everyone else for not being invited to the drill.