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Former Postmedia chairman Paul Godfrey, shown in Toronto in 2019, waded into a legal battle this week between the province of Ontario and a technology company called Keel Digital Solutions Corp., chaired by his son, Rob Godfrey.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Former Postmedia chairman Paul Godfrey has been removed from the advisory council to the Order of Ontario, days after accusing Premier Doug Ford’s office of trying to use the potential extension of a government contract with a company run by Mr. Godfrey’s son as “political leverage.”
The Ontario government confirmed on Friday that the 87-year-old Mr. Godfrey, a longtime Progressive Conservative, is no longer on the council that evaluates nominees and makes recommendations for the Order of Ontario, the province’s highest civilian honour.
“Mr. Godfrey has made false public claims and has put himself in a conflict of interest. As a result, he has been removed from the Advisory Council to the Order of Ontario,” said Jaskarn Kailey, a spokesperson for Ontario’s Citizenship and Multiculturalism Minister, Graham McGregor.
Mr. Godfrey’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
The longtime political powerbroker, who is himself a member of both the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada, served as chairman of Metro Toronto from 1973 to 1984 and later was CEO of the Toronto Blue Jays. He waded into a tangled legal battle this week between the province and a technology company called Keel Digital Solutions Corp., chaired by his son, Rob Godfrey. The company, which faces an Ontario Provincial Police probe, was put into receivership this week over unpaid debts.
In an allegation that has been denied by both the Premier’s Office and Postmedia, Mr. Godfrey says he felt pressured to ask his former newspaper chain to print an op-ed by the Premier before last year’s snap provincial election – in return for help from a senior official to hurry the approval of a new three-year government contract for Keel.
Keel Digital and its subsidiary Get A-Head Inc., which operated an online mental-health counselling portal, had received about $40-million in government payments over the past five years from the province’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour’s Skills Development Fund, which distributes cash for worker-training programs and was the subject of a political firestorm last year.
Last year, Ontario forwarded a forensic audit of Get A-Head to the OPP, prompting the force to open an investigation.
Early this year, the province took the companies and their executives to court, accusing them of “fraudulent misrepresentation” and demanding $25.7-million in repayments. The defendants have denied any wrongdoing and countersued, alleging $100-million in damages. Talks to settle the legal fight have not resulted in a deal. The allegations have not been tested in court.
In a sworn statement that was released this week, the elder Mr. Godfrey alleges that in January, 2025, his son told him that he had just spoken to Patrick Sackville, then Mr. Ford’s chief of staff. The statement says Mr. Sackville had agreed to help hurry up an approval for a proposal to switch Keel’s contract with the Ministry of Colleges and Universities to a three-year term, instead of having to renew it each year.
But the statement alleges that Mr. Sackville then added that he needed a “favour” – the publication of a letter from the Premier in all of Postmedia’s Ontario newspapers justifying the province’s impending early election call. Mr. Godfrey’s time at the helm of Postmedia had ended in 2022, and while he said he was “uncomfortable” with the request, he still brought it to the media company’s brass.
“I have spent an entire career either in or around politics,” his statement reads. “I understood what this demand from the Premier’s office meant. This was using political leverage and power over a small company to extract a benefit that Keel had no ability to provide.”
Mr. Sackville told The Globe and Mail on Thursday that “the allegation is entirely false.”
In a statement provided Thursday by Mr. Ford’s spokesperson Hannah Jensen, the Premier’s Office said Mr. Godfrey’s “claims are categorically untrue and completely disconnected from reality.”
In a statement sent to media on Thursday, Mr. Godfrey repeated the allegations and called the response from the Premier’s Office “laughable.”
In a statement, Postmedia said it was the Premier’s Office that approached the company’s current CEO about an op-ed, and that the request was passed to the editorial team for consideration, who chose to run it.
“No commercial consideration would ever be required for the Premier, or any political figure, to share their opinion in our editorial pages,” the Postmedia statement reads. “We have no knowledge of the background events described by Mr. Godfrey.”