ILAC Brand Guidelines: A Toronto Language School of 1997 That Closed in 2026

Three partners and a first intake of 25.

ILAC stands for the International Language Academy of Canada. It was founded in Toronto in 1997 by Jonathan Kolber, Ilan Cohen and Bernardo Riveros, according to a 2015 profile in Business Elite Canada and to reporting by The PIE News in 2026. The magazine said the idea came from Kolber while he was working part time as a teacher of English as a second language, and that the partners held a grand opening in the summer of 1997, inviting students already studying English across the city.

The same profile gives a rare look at the school’s early months. It said the first intake in July 1997 was 25 students, rising to 40 in August and 70 in September, before falling back in December, when many students from Korea, then close to half the school, went home during an economic crisis there. What steadied the school, the magazine said, was that the founders had also been marketing to students from South America, especially Colombia, where the school year ended in December and students looked for English courses starting in the new year. A mix of nationalities became part of how ILAC described itself; by 2015 Business Elite Canada said it drew students from more than 80 countries, and that enrolment had grown by 15 to 20 percent a year since those early days.

ILAC grew into a group, later named ILAC Education Group in trade reports and by its owner, with schools in Toronto and Vancouver, the two cities it stayed in until the end. The 2015 profile ran under the headline “Largest language school in Canada”, and in 2023 The PIE News called ILAC the country’s biggest private education group. Its owner later used similar words: the investment firm ONCAP describes ILAC as Canada’s largest private English language school.

Investors, college partners and an online school.

Ownership changed in August 2019, when ONCAP, the Canadian private equity firm, acquired a majority stake in ILAC Education Group in partnership with the founders and management, according to ONCAP’s own portfolio page. ONCAP describes modern, boutique campuses in Toronto and Vancouver offering language, pathway and vocational college programmes, and says the group offered English and French courses on site and online, college programmes, youth summer camps and high school.

The years after 2019 brought college partnerships. The PIE News reported that ILAC announced a partnership with Georgian College in Toronto in late 2020, with Georgian launching three programmes at ILAC’s downtown campus, which it called boutique-style, and a tie-up with Fanshawe College in 2021, with Fanshawe programmes starting at ILAC in spring 2022. In summer 2023, the same title said, ILAC and Fanshawe opened a larger downtown Toronto campus with 44 classrooms, serving some 1,200 international students from 29 countries.

ILAC also bought other businesses. In September 2023 The PIE News reported that ILAC had acquired Tamwood International College, a school founded in 1992 with campuses in Toronto and Vancouver and a hospitality school in Whistler; ILAC’s chief executive at the time, John DeFranco, said the group would keep building the Tamwood brand. In October 2024 it reported that ILAC had acquired UniApplyNow, a digital platform created in 2022 that students and agents use to apply to colleges and universities in the US; The PIE News said it worked with more than 200 of them. The group’s online English school, ILAC KISS, began offering part-time classes in March 2024 and added a German-language offshoot in June 2024, when The PIE News also reported plans for an international high school and new pathway partners in the US and Europe.

The co-founder Jonathan Kolber became chairman of the group in 2023 and stepped down as chief executive in 2024, The PIE News reported, before leaving the group in 2025.

How language schools present themselves.

Language schools sell something that is hard to photograph: progress in a language. Their websites tend to show the setting instead. ELS, for example, describes its centres as sitting on American college campuses and points to shared lounges, cafeterias and computer labs, while inlingua’s international site sorts its courses for adults, companies and children and names the local centre, such as inlingua Berlin or inlingua Utah, beside each student quote.

Course and level names do much of the identity work. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages offers a shared scale of six levels, from A1 to C2, and inlingua organises its own course books by those codes. Others number their own ladders: ELS teaches in 12 class levels and says more than 600 colleges recognise its level 109 or 112.

Much of the booking and some of the teaching happen online. Schools such as inlingua and ELS carry placement tests, application pages and branded learning platforms on their sites: inlingua runs a family of “my.” products for e-learning and virtual classrooms, and ELS offers a free online English test and a WhatsApp chat with admissions staff.

Owners, networks and accreditations appear on the schools’ corporate pages. inlingua licenses its name to independently owned centres, a franchise model the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten described in 2024. ELS names its accreditation by ACCET, and since 2022 has belonged with ILSC and Berlitz to Language Education Holdings, The PIE News reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand, and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A bankruptcy filing and an immediate stop.

ILAC no longer trades. On Friday 18 September 2026 the company posted a notice on its website saying it had filed for bankruptcy protection and was ceasing operations with immediate effect, with all classes and programmes cancelled. The notice said ILAC no longer had the financial resources to continue operating, and that KPMG Inc. had been appointed as Licensed Insolvency Trustee under Canada’s Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. The PIE News reported the next day that some 1,362 international students were thought to be affected, and described ILAC as a 30-year-old business and one of the largest English-teaching operators in Canada. The filing came days after another large operator, EC English, said it was closing all 25 of its schools, the same report noted.

The closure ended a run of almost three decades under the ILAC name in Toronto and Vancouver. On 21 September 2026 The PIE News reported that Kolber, who had left the group the year before, had announced a new Toronto school called Dream English School, at a property that had until recently housed an ILAC school. The ILAC website now opens on that closure notice.

For a design guide, ILAC shows how a three-letter acronym can carry a school from a single Toronto intake to a multi-campus group. Compare ILSC, another Canadian language school group, and EF Education First. For this guide we use a lake blue, ink blue and a maple orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ILAC’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.