A farm in the Ontario Greenbelt in Freelton, Ont., on July 10.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Ontario’s Auditor-General has issued a scathing report on the provincial government’s removal of 3,000 hectares from its protected Greenbelt, saying the changes resulted from a “biased” process driven by a senior political staffer that “favoured certain developers” and lacked environmental or financial analysis.
The report by Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk also estimates, based on 2016 data from the Municipal Property Assessment Corp. (MPAC), that the landowners of the 15 formerly protected sites opened up for housing last year could see their worth balloon by more than $8.3-billion.
The Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford has faced a firestorm of criticism over its move last fall to break its own repeated promises and redraw the boundaries of the 800,000-hectare Greenbelt, which arcs around the Greater Toronto Area and was created in 2005 to preserve farmland and contain sprawl. The legislature’s Integrity Commissioner is also investigating.
The Ontario Provincial Police – with whom Ms. Lysyk said she has met – has said that it is considering whether to launch an investigation.
Mr. Ford says the changes will create 50,000 new homes, which are needed amid the housing crisis as hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrive in Ontario annually, which he called “unprecedented growth.”
He and his Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister, Steve Clark, said on Wednesday that the developers involved, who are now in talks with provincial and municipal officials on their plans, will have to provide billions in infrastructure and must get shovels in the ground by the end of 2025, or the lands will be returned to protection.
But a chorus of experts has long concluded that the extra protected land is not needed and the province already has ample land earmarked to build new homes, conclusions Ms. Lysyk cites in her report.
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Opposition critics have pointed out that several of the wealthy landowners who stand to benefit are also large donors to the governing party. They have also raised questions, given recent sales of properties later removed from protection, about whether some developers knew about the changes in advance. Both Mr. Clark and Mr. Ford have denied tipping off landowners.
All but one of the properties removed from the Greenbelt, in what the Auditor-General calls a “seriously flawed” process that took just three weeks, were identified for a small group of civil servants assigned to work on the project by Ryan Amato, the chief of staff to Mr. Clark. Mr. Amato was put in that role by Mr. Ford’s office in July, 2022.
The extremely tight timeline and confidentiality provisions, the audit says, meant bureaucrats could not fully analyze the environmental impact or provide alternatives to the Greenbelt removals.
“We found that how the land sites were selected was not transparent, fair, objective or fully informed,” Ms. Lysyk said.
The bulk of the removed land was identified in documents that Mr. Amato received from two prominent developers asking for their lands to be taken out of the Greenbelt at an industry banquet in September, 2022. Ms. Lysyk does not name the developers in her report.
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The largest landholders in the single biggest chunk removed from the Greenbelt, the former Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve east of Toronto, are companies linked to prominent builder Silvio De Gasperis, who went to court to fight a summons to speak to the Auditor-General for her investigation, as did fellow developer Michael Rice, who also has a site removed from elsewhere in the Greenbelt.
“Direct access to the Housing Minister’s chief of staff resulted in certain prominent developers receiving preferential treatment,” Ms. Lysyk’s report says.
In a statement responding to the report, Neil Wilson, a lawyer for Mr. De Gasperis’s TACC Group, said the developer’s requests for land to be removed from the Greenbelt were identical to ones they made to the previous Liberal government in 2016 during its review of the Greenbelt.
He also said the company can’t predict how much their properties will be worth because there will be significant costs to develop them and build infrastructure such as parks, roads and other “community benefits.”
Mr. Amato could not be reached by The Globe and Mail. Mr. Rice did not respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Lysyk’s report also says that Mr. Clark’s chief of staff “noted that he did not tell the developers and landowners that the government was considering removing land from the Greenbelt, but would consider the requests if it decided to do so.”
Both NDP Opposition Leader Marit Stiles and interim Liberal Leader John Fraser called for Mr. Clark to resign or be fired.
But the Premier stood by his minister, telling reporters on Wednesday that he agreed that problems Ms. Lysyk had identified in the decision-making process needed to be fixed and insisting swift action was required to build more housing. Mr. Ford also said his government would not implement Ms. Lysyk’s recommendation that it reconsider the Greenbelt removals in light of her findings.
“Failing to act would worsen the housing supply and affordability crisis,” Mr. Ford said, saying that the new urgency of the housing crunch forced his government to decide to swap land out of the Greenbelt for housing, while adding in other land elsewhere, after last year’s re-election.
“We were moving fast,” the Premier said. " … We could have had a better process.”
Speaking to reporters, Ms. Stiles charged that the report shows the government wanted to hand developers a multibillion-dollar windfall and allow them to create “luxury sprawl.”
“Let’s call this what it is: corruption. Ontarians deserve better than a government that enriches a select number of party donors at the expense of hard-working Ontarians,” said Ms. Stiles, who was the first of the opposition leaders at Queen’s Park to request that the Auditor-General investigate.
The narrative outlined in Ms. Lysyk’s report directly contradicts the account Mr. Ford and Mr. Clark had provided to Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake. He said earlier this year in a preliminary report that Mr. Ford and Mr. Clark told him the properties removed from the Greenbelt were chosen by non-political civil servants.
Both men told the Auditor-General that they were not aware of the way Mr. Amato had chosen the Greenbelt sites. They also said they were unaware of the specific properties until just days before they were presented to cabinet. Ms. Lysyk told reporters that Mr. Clark should have been aware of what his chief of staff was up to.
Mr. Ford and Mr. Clark had repeatedly promised not to touch the Greenbelt, after the Liberals had distributed a video taken of Mr. Ford before the 2018 election promising to turn a “big chunk” over to developers. The reversal was not revealed until November.
Once the accelerated Greenbelt process was under way, Ms. Lysyk said, just 22 properties in total were considered, with 21 provided to the civil service by the chief of staff – despite the more than 600 long-standing requests for Greenbelt removals.
With a report from Dustin Cook