How Ontario’s innovation agencies spend more guarding the gate than letting anyone through it

I recently attended a webinar for the Ontario Creates Global Market Development Fund for the Interactive industry. The program exists, in its own words, to provide “eligible Ontario companies with funding to participate in international activities that support company growth and produce measurable business and market development results.” It will reimburse up to $15,000, capped at 50% of your costs, for sales trips and attendance at international market events.

That is the upside for you, the entrepreneur.

Then I noticed something: the government employee running the session was being flown to a major German games conference. Not as an investor. Not as a founder. Not as a buyer or a licensee or a publisher. As a representative of the agency. She had no product to sell, no quarterly number to hit, no revenue on the line. Her professional existence, her salary, her travel budget, her conference lanyard, is subsidized by the same tax base that the $15,000 grant is supposed to serve.

That is the tell. Once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it.

What the Money Actually Buys

Before you can receive a single dollar from the Ontario Creates fund, you must: register your company’s corporate information in the Online Application Portal; attend a mandatory information session; read the full program guidelines, and be warned that “attending an Information Session is not a substitute for reading the Program Guidelines”; submit your application before the deadline (April 27, 2026, at 5:00 PM ET, in case you were wondering); and then wait to find out if you have been selected in a competitive process where the number of awards “will be determined by the annual confirmed budget.”

There are two email addresses for support, a phone number for the program coordinator, a French-language session available on request, and an accessibility accommodation process. Consultations are available until two weeks before the deadline. After that, email only, and no response is guaranteed.

Every single one of those verbs: register, attend, read, submit, wait, email, represents an internal cost. Staff to run the portal. Staff to host the webinar. Staff to travel to Germany to stay current on the industry they are funding. Staff to answer emails. Staff to assess applications. Staff to write the program guidelines. Staff whose salaries are, by definition, permanent.

The grant is occasional. The bureaucracy is forever.

The Sunshine List Does Not Lie

The Ontario Government publishes the Sunshine List every year: a public record of every public-sector employee earning more than $100,000. Two agencies that exist specifically to channel funding to small businesses offer an instructive look at where the money really flows.

Intellectual Property Ontario (IPON) was created to help small and medium-sized Ontario businesses protect and commercialize their intellectual property. To access its programs, a company must be Ontario-based with fewer than 500 employees, must own or exclusively license IP it intends to commercialize, must operate in approved sectors (health technology, life sciences, AI, vehicle technology, mining technology, agriculture, clean technology, or advanced manufacturing), and must demonstrate financial ability, even with IPON’s help, to protect and monetize that IP. In other words, the bar is high, the eligible population is narrow, and the grants are capped.

The 2025 Sunshine List tells a different story inside the building:

Name	Title	Salary (2025)
Michael Huynh	General Counsel	$228,759
Cheryl Nicholson	Chief Operating Officer	$219,726
Denise Bagheri	Director, Programs and Operations	$181,782
Amonulla Khakimov	Senior Director, Corporate, Government Relations and Partnerships	$174,690
Karen Blakey	Director, People, Culture and Talent Engagement	$171,740
Alena Voloboeva	(Staff)	$156,798
Michael S. Colucci	(Staff)	$156,798
Kiranpal Sohi	(Staff)	$144,441
Paul Paolatto	(Staff)	$140,696
Christopher J. Leclerc	(Staff)	$134,203

IPON disclosed 17 employees on the Sunshine List in 2025, with a combined payroll of $2,518,355: an average salary of $148,139. That headcount grew 13.3% in a single year.

Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI) describes itself as dedicated to “helping Ontario innovators get connected with the researchers, industry partners and funding needed to commercialize the next generation of made-in-Ontario IP.” The 2024 Sunshine List shows 31 employees earning over $100,000, with combined disclosed salaries of $4,691,170. The top three earners alone: CEO Claudia Krywiak at $401,222, Raed Kadri at $293,472, and Hiten Makim at $265,389, together earn nearly $960,000 per year.

Let that sink in. Three people at OCI earn more, combined, than sixty-four small businesses could collectively receive from the Ontario Creates export fund, assuming each business successfully navigated the portal, attended the webinar, read the guidelines completely, and was selected in the competitive process.

The Pattern Is Not a Bug. It Is the Product.

Ontario’s Auditor General Shelley Spence examined the province’s flagship Skills Development Fund and found that 54% of all approved applications, representing $742 million in funding, were rated poor, low, or medium against the program’s own stated objectives and criteria. One approved project was a single person training themselves. Another applicant with no experience managing government money received $4 million. A total of $126 million went to applicants who came through lobbyists.

Her summary: the process was “not fair, transparent or accountable.”

This is not a Doug Ford problem or a Liberal problem or an NDP problem. It is a structural problem. When government becomes the allocator of commercial capital, two things happen simultaneously: the selection process requires human judgment (which means discretion, which means political interference), and the apparatus required to exercise that discretion grows into a permanent institutional interest. The Fraser Institute’s analysis of Ontario’s 2023-24 Public Accounts found hundreds of millions in “transfer payments” flowing to automobile manufacturers, candy companies, breweries, and plastic firms, money for which “no goods and services are received, which will not be repaid, and for which no financial returns are expected.”

Harvard research published in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly found that organizations dependent on government grants consistently accumulate higher administrative overhead than those without “the receipt of government contributions and grants appears to make nonprofits more inefficient and more bureaucratic in their operations.” The grant does not just flow to the recipient. It flows into the compliance and oversight apparatus around the recipient, and that apparatus has a budget cycle and a Sunshine List of its own.

What AI Could Do Instead

Here is what is genuinely insulting about the current setup: almost every gatekeeping function these agencies perform is algorithmic. It is checkbox work wearing a blazer.

Eligibility screening at IPON is already a structured checklist: Ontario incorporated, fewer than 500 employees, approved sector, Ontario headquarters, Canadian controlled, financial capacity to co-invest. That is not discernment. That is a filter. A language model running against a structured application form can check those boxes in seconds, not weeks.

Scoring is not much more complex. You set weights: export revenue percentage, year-over-year growth, private capital already raised, matching funds committed, and you rank applicants. Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research now uses an AI system that processes 1,000 grant-related queries per week, provides sourced answers in under three seconds, and meets 100% of federal cloud security standards. The entire solution was built in six months. A recent human-AI collaboration study found that AI-augmented review teams achieved 23% better accuracy than either humans or AI working independently on complex multi-criteria applications.

You can also encode red-flag detection. Does the applicant have a lobbyist on staff? Has the applicant received funding three years running with no disclosed commercialization outcomes? Is an executive at the granting agency also a director of the applicant’s parent company? Flag it. Route it to a three-person human oversight panel. Publish the flags. Watch behaviour change.

The current system does the reverse. It buries decision-making behind human discretion, which is exactly where political interference lives, as the Skills Development Fund proved. Transparency through automation is the enemy of the $126 million lobbyist windfall.

The Honest Version of This Program

The honest version of the Ontario Creates Global Market Development Fund would look like this: you post a plain-language eligibility checklist online. Any company that meets the checklist submits a structured form: revenue, employees, export markets targeted, event name, cost breakdown. An automated system verifies the numbers against your CRA filings, checks your incorporation status, confirms you haven’t already hit the lifetime cap, and issues a funding commitment within 48 hours. No webinar. No information session. No portal helpdesk email. No German conference.

Total administrative overhead: perhaps two staff. A policy analyst who writes the rules and updates them annually, and an auditor who reviews a random sample of claims.

The rest of the $2.5 million IPON payroll and the $4.7 million OCI payroll could go, if the government is genuinely interested in economic development, directly to the businesses. Or it could be returned to the taxpayers who funded it.

What you would lose is the career path. The conference lanyard. The Sunshine List entry. The comfortable fiction that government employees at these salaries are “helping” businesses, when what they are actually doing is managing the administrative cost of the help.

I went to that webinar to find out how to get my game company funded. What I found instead was the system explaining itself: the grant is the excuse. The bureaucracy is the product.