It has been a week of bombshell announcements.
It started with prime minister Trudeau’s about the government of India’s possible involvement in the murder of a Canadian citizen.
The PM chose the first day of the fall parliamentary session to make that startling allegation.
Then, a few days later, Ontario premier Doug Ford chose to release his own bomb, at a Conservative caucus meeting in Niagara Falls, on the eve of a new session of the legislature.
After months of digging in his heels, and in the wake of yet another resignation, Ford said he is pulling the plug on his government’s plans to open up parts of the greenbelt for housing development.
It took two damning reports, and the resignations of two cabinet ministers, a chief of staff, and a senior adviser to the premier himself, to get Ford to act. But he finally did.
After resisting for so long, why did the premier change course? We might never know, but bad opinion polls could have something to do with it.
A more likely explanation is that the Ontario Conservatives are deeply worried about what other revelations might come out, as a result of criminal investigations and of persistent journalistic digging.
From what we know so far, the process the Ford government launched more than a year ago to remove environmentally sensitive lands from protection, and allow private sector interests to profit from them, was more than merely flawed.
It was, as NDP leader Marit Stiles points out, rife with opportunities for corruption.
The now-former Ontario Auditor General (AG) Bonnie Lysyk reported a month and half ago that a handful of Conservative-connected developers stood to make more than $8 billion in unearned profit from the sale of Greenbelt real estate.
That was shocking enough. But if one reads the AG report carefully, it turns out those billions are not the half of this scandal.
Ford did his huge 180 turnabout in the hopes the media, the opposition, and all Ontarians might forget what Lysyk has had to say.
Just for that reason, it is worth having a second look at the report that led, ultimately, to the Ontario Conservatives’ dramatic backtrack.
World’s largest greenbelt
Lysyk starts by explaining what greenbelts are and why they are important.
“Greenbelts,” she writes, “have been a planning approach to manage urban development and to protect farmland and natural areas around the world for decades.”
“A greenbelt is a swath of undeveloped land that encircles a city, town or region. They generally comprise a combination of public and private lands on which there are development restrictions. The primary objectives of greenbelt policies are to protect
agricultural land, conserve nature, contain urban growth, and provide recreational spaces for people,” Lysyk adds
Among the cities that have greenbelts are London (UK), San Francisco, Copenhagen, Ottawa, and Sao Paolo in Brazil. The Greenbelt Ford wanted to develop around the Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario (which includes the greater Toronto area) is the largest in the world, at about two million acres.
Ontario’s Greenbelt, Lysyk explains, was created to help control urbanization and sprawl – characterized by low-density, single-family houses – and to reduce the corresponding loss of farmland, forests, wetlands, streams and other natural features.
Those natural features clean the air and provide drinking water for millions of Ontarians. They also give folks a place for outdoor recreational activities. And if that weren’t enough, they include some of Canada’s most important and productive farmland.
The raison d’être for the protected Greenbelt is to head off loss and fragmentation of the farming land base and “give permanent protection to the natural heritage and water resource systems that sustain ecological and human health.”
In addition, the Greenbelt has another vocation, now, after the summer of wildfires, more crucial than ever: “to build resilience to and mitigate climate change.”
None of this has mattered to Doug Ford. He is reported to have complained that all the greenbelt consists of is “useless weeds”.
Still, as a consummate politician Ford once did promise, publicly, not to touch the Greenbelt. There is strong evidence, however, he was saying something else privately to his developer friends and Conservative party donors.
The crisis in affordable housing gave the premier an ideal opportunity to ditch the public promise and proceed with what he had wanted to do all along.
His government decided on a seemingly random figure of 7,400 acres which they would remove from the greenbelt and on which real estate developers could build suburban subdivisions. Such a move would greatly increase that land’s monetary value.
No “fair, transparent and respectful consultation”
When the time came to put the greenbelt plan into action, Lysyk’s report explains how Ford’s political operatives did an end run around the professional public servants.
Previous governments had removed small pieces from the greenbelt, respecting environmental criteria and the need to consult widely.
The Ford government was not interested in any of those tedious requirements. It wanted to act in great haste and with stealth.
In November 2022 the Ontario housing ministry posted notice that it planned to “re-designate” 15 parcels of land in the greenbelt, which totalled the 7,400 acres the government targeted.
Although it fulfilled the legal requirement to hold 30 days of public consultation in advance of determining any plan to remove protection from the Greenbelt, the ministry paid no heed whatsoever to the 35,000 submissions it received.
Those submissions came from members of the public, municipalities, Indigenous communities, and other stakeholders (including the environmental, development and agricultural sectors).
Ten days after the consultation period ended – not even enough time to do anything close to a serious review of all of those submissions – the Ford folks announced they were proceeding with their original plan. They made not a single change in response to the consultations.
In Bonnie Lysyk’s words, “fair, transparent and respectful consultation did not take place”.
As we now know, the point man for the whole operation was Ryan Amato, then-housing minister Steve Clark’s chief of staff.
Amato had worked for leader Doug Ford directly when the Conservatives were in opposition, and it was the premier’s office who selected him to run the political side of Clark’s office.
The chief of staff created conditions, such as tight deadlines, that made it impossible for public servants in the housing ministry to fully discharge their responsibilities.
Indeed, the administrative process for turning 15 pieces of environmentally sensitive land into huge cash assets for a few people was similar to the public consultation: The fix was in from the outset.
In the words of the AG’s report, Amato “instructed the non-political public service staff to conduct an exercise that limited their site selection assessment to land sites” he had identified.
Amato “also limited staff’s time to assess the sites,” and, more important, he unilaterally “adjusted the assessment criteria, including eliminating the consideration of agricultural and environmental factors.”
Changing the criteria “facilitated the selection of these specific land sites,” all owned by Conservative donors and Ford Nation friends.
Real estate developers lobbied the chief of staff personally
Two central players in this whole affair – real estate developers who had requested re-designation of five of the 15 sites that accounted for more than 90 per cent of the total acreage to be removed from the greenbelt – refused to speak with the Auditor General’s investigators.
They are Silvio De Gasperis, president of the Tacc Group of companies, who owns more than two dozen properties in the environmentally valuable greenbelt area known as the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve, and Michael Rice, CEO of Rice Group, who owns property in the township of King, near Newmarket.
Both approached Amato, privately, in September 2022, at the Building Industry and Land Development Association’s (BILD) Chair’s Dinner.
Rice gave Amato a package indicating which land he wanted to see removed from Greenbelt protection, then, the next day, bought some of that land for $80 million.
Amato lorded it over a small group of public servants, who were sworn to secrecy, and thus helpless to blow the whistle on what seemed like an illegitimate process.
Those public servants told Lysyk’s office they did not think Amato was acting as a rogue operator. They were convinced he was following orders from the premier’s office.
The stench of possible criminal behaviour hangs over this affair. At the request of the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP is now looking into that.
Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s entire housing strategy would open the door wide to the kind of abuse we have seen in the Ontario greenbelt scandal.
Poilievre wants to get rid of what he calls gatekeepers, by which he means public servants mandated to see that laws, good governance practices, and environmental rules are respected.
Ford has the same goal as Poilievre for Ontario, and he has been quite open about it.
That’s why the premier enacted the so-called strong mayor powers. The purpose of giving extra powers to big city mayors is to allow those mayors to override democratically-elected city councils, when those councils have the temerity to stand in the way of real estate developers’ projects.
And the Ontario Conservatives have other privatization plans, notably in health care.
In commenting on Ford’s Greenbelt about-face, the Ontario NDP’s leader Marit Stiles mentioned those plans. She promised to watch the government vigilantly as it goes about implementing its privatization agenda.
The Greenbelt scandal, and what it represents, should not end with Ford’s admitting, yet again, he’s not perfect, and saying, with barely credible contrition, that he’s sorry.
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