Ability not showing expected behaviour

[creativetags]

I'm having an issue setting up an ability that looks like this:

can :read, Project, :allocate_to => user.id

The problem is

ability.can?(:read, my_project)

returns false even though

Project.accessible_by(ability)

returns just the projects for that user as expected.

I'm running 1.6.10 on rails 3.2.19 with ruby 1.9.3-p547

Is this a bug with cancan or my code? How do I find out why ability.can?(:read, my_project) is failing?

[creativetags]

See CanCanCommunity/cancancan#121