Ontario Premier Doug Ford, right, followed by Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark, leave a press conference following the release of the Auditor General’s Special Report on Changes to the Greenbelt, in Toronto, on Aug. 9.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has asked the province’s Integrity Commissioner to review the conduct of the political staffer at the centre of the Greenbelt controversy, as recommended by the Auditor-General in a report this week concluding that the removal of lands from the protected area last year “favoured certain developers.”
Ryan Amato, chief of staff to Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark, was singled out by Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk for meeting with a small number of developers and controlling a “biased,” secret, three-week process to choose the properties taken out of the Greenbelt last December.
The Progressive Conservative government has faced a political furor over its move to break its own repeated promises and redraw the boundaries of the province’s 800,000-hectare Greenbelt, which arcs around the Greater Toronto Area and was created in 2005 to preserve farmland and contain sprawl.
Mr. Ford says the move is needed to address Ontario’s acute housing shortage, due to be worsened by higher levels of immigration. But experts and even the province’s own housing task force have said that the protected land is not needed.
The Auditor-General released a report on Wednesday concluding that the process to choose the Greenbelt land to be removed lacked environmental or financial analysis, and that 14 of the 15 properties were suggested by Mr. Amato.
The bulk of the land was identified in documents handed to him by two prominent developers at an industry banquet, the audit says. In all, Ms. Lysyk concludes, the removal of the 3,000 hectares has meant that a small number of developers, including large PC donors, saw their land holdings shoot up in value by more than $8.3-billion.
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Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake is already investigating allegations that developers were tipped off, something Mr. Ford and Mr. Clark have denied. The Ontario Provincial Police have said they were considering whether to launch an investigation. On Thursday, OPP spokesman Bill Dickson said the force was aware of the Auditor-General’s report but that the question of an investigation was still subject to an “ongoing review” by the OPP’s anti-rackets branch.
When they faced reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Ford and Mr. Clark said little about Mr. Amato, who was put in his post by the Premier’s Office in July, 2022. He could not be reached on Thursday.
The Integrity Commissioner’s Office confirmed that the Premier’s Office has requested a review of Mr. Amato’s role in the affair, as it had pledged on Wednesday in its official response included in Ms. Lysyk’s audit.
While the government has declined to enact the auditor’s centrepiece recommendation to reconsider its Greenbelt land swap in light of her report, it has agreed to implement “in principle” all 14 others. Among them is her call for the Integrity Commissioner to determine whether Mr. Amato violated the Public Service of Ontario Act “with respect to his liaisons with land developers and their representatives.”
The act includes regulations that govern conflict of interest for public servants. Those rules prohibit giving anyone “preferential treatment” or creating the appearance of preferential treatment.
Under the legislation, Mr. Wake can alert the minister if he finds any conflict of interest or apparent conflict involving a political staffer and can direct the staffer to take certain actions. If his advice is disregarded, the act says, the individual can face “disciplinary measures, including suspension and dismissal.”
Such determinations are not normally made public. However, Caitlin Clark, a spokeswoman for Mr. Ford, told The Globe and Mail in an e-mail on Friday that the report on Mr. Amato would be made public, “while respecting HR obligations.”
According to his LinkedIn page, Mr. Amato was a student in the University of Ottawa’s political science and government department who worked in 2015 for a federal ministry under the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. He then moved on to roles with Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives in advance of the 2018 election, while they were in opposition. He was a political staffer in two other ministries before being appointed Mr. Clark’s chief of staff last year.
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The Auditor-General says that the small group of non-political civil servants assigned to the Greenbelt project assumed Mr. Amato was doing the bidding of Mr. Clark and Mr. Ford. Both Mr. Ford and Mr. Clark say they were unaware of the way the lands were chosen. They had previously told the Integrity Commissioner that the properties were selected by neutral civil servants. Opposition critics say it is inconceivable that a chief of staff could have acted without the knowledge of his superiors.
Ms. Lysyk says Mr. Amato told her he did not tell developers that the government was considering Greenbelt removals.
Because of the tight three-week timeline, and the confidentiality agreements civil servants were obligated to sign, the sites could not be fully examined by experts, nor could many alternative sites be suggested, the auditor found. Plus, she says, the chief of staff dropped or altered both environmental criteria and the requirement that sites had to be easily serviced from existing infrastructure such as pipes and roads.
Among its recommendations, the audit says the government put in place a new formal process to allow non-political civil servants to raise objections when “proper information-gathering and decision-making protocols are disregarded,” as exists in Britain.
With a report from Dustin Cook