Traffic passes through the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve, part of Ontario's Greenbelt, on May 15.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
There has always been an unpleasant odour coming from the Ontario government’s decision to open 15 parcels of land in the Greenbelt – a massive swath of protected farms, fragile ecosystems and headwaters around the western end of Lake Ontario – to housing development. On Wednesday, the province’s Auditor-General explained why.
Bonnie Lysyk’s report into the Ford government’s changes to the Greenbelt could not be more damning.
It reconfirms what was already known: that the government didn’t need to open up the Greenbelt to meet its goal of building 1.5-million new homes over 10 years, because there is enough developable land elsewhere; and that most of the properties unbuckled from the Greenbelt belong to developers who made generous donations to the Ontario PC Party.
Where the report breaks new ground is in its dismantling of the Ford government’s claim that the 15 chosen properties were selected according to strict criterion independently overseen by non-political staff working in the public interest.
On the contrary, Ms. Lysyk found that the site selection was “undermined” by “non-elected political staff, and developers and their lobbyists,” leading to a process that was “not transparent, fair, objective, or fully informed.”
At the centre of her findings is Ryan Amato, the chief of staff to Housing Minister Steve Clark.
Ms. Lysyk says Mr. Amato last October asked the deputy minister of housing to create a “Greenbelt Project Team,” a small group of non-political public servants, to select the sites. He gave them three weeks to choose, and imposed a confidentiality agreement on them that prohibited them from speaking about their work to people in “other provincial ministries, municipalities, conservation authorities, Indigenous communities, subject matter experts and the general public,” the report said.
According to Ms. Lysyk, Mr. Amato then fed the team 21 sites for possible removal from the Greenbelt – even though there were more than 630 requests on hand for similar treatment. Owing to their limited ability to do research, the team came up with only one other possible site.
Because of the confidentiality agreement, the team also couldn’t approach municipalities to find out whether the land Mr. Amato proposed for removal met the criterion of having “available or planned infrastructure services.”
The team instead agreed to confirm whether the sites were adjacent to already developed land. On two sites that were ultimately selected where that was not the case, they simply adjusted the boundaries to create the needed adjacency.
And when many of the sites didn’t meet the criterion of not being “in a designated specialty crop area or [a] part of the Greenbelt’s Natural Heritage System,” that criterion was dropped, too. Of the 15 chosen sites, 13 contain land designated for specialty crops and/or Natural Heritage System lands.
In the end, more than two-thirds of the land removed was on properties suggested to Mr. Amato by two developers in September, 2022, just before the government announced its plan to open the Greenbelt to development.
Overall, of the 3,000 hectares extracted, 92 per cent was removed as a direct result of developer access to the chief of staff, Ms. Lysyk said.
“Direct access to the Housing Minister’s chief of staff resulted in certain prominent developers receiving preferential treatment,” she concluded – a favouritism she says could be worth $8.3-billion to the lucky landowners.
The whole thing reeks of a project that had a predetermined outcome. Ms. Lysyk rather cheekily recommends that, since Premier Doug Ford and Mr. Clark continue to insist improbably that they thought the selection of the 15 sites was done by non-political public servants in an independent process, they should re-evaluate the decision.
There is little chance of that. The NDP opposition is calling for Mr. Clark’s resignation, but Mr. Ford said Wednesday he continues to support his minister.
There is still an investigation by the provincial ethics commissioner to come, however. And in her report, Ms. Lysyk outlined potential violations of the province’s lobbying rules and the Public Service of Ontario Act.
Voters, too, will have their say. From where they sit – many of them suffering through a housing shortage – what they must see now is a government appearing to exploit their pain to help out its wealthy friends first and foremost.