How lobbying ‘loopholes’ allowed developers’ Greenbelt meetings to be kept off books

‘A lot of lobbying will be done ... but will never see the light of day on the public registry,” Ontario integrity commissioner’s latest report says.

Thestar.com
Sept. 1, 2023
Brendan Kennedy

Most of the lobbying by prominent housing developers that led to thousands of acres being removed from the Greenbelt and billions of dollars added to the value of their lands does not appear anywhere in Ontario’s lobbyist registry.

That’s because the bulk of the meetings, emails and phone calls between the developers and government officials didn’t have to be registered, thanks to what critics describe as “loopholes” in the province’s lobbying rules.

While outside consultants hired for the sole purpose of lobbying must register no matter how many hours they work, those employed directly by a company can lobby on its behalf without registering, as long as their lobbying doesn’t exceed 50 hours in a year.

The exemption for these kind of “in-house” lobbyists has been widely criticized, including by Ontario’s integrity commissioner, J. David Wake, who highlighted the problem in his damning investigation into the province’s “chaotic and almost reckless process” to open up parts of the Greenbelt to development.

“A lot of lobbying can be done in 49 hours but will never see the light of day on the public registry,” wrote Wake, who is responsible for enforcing lobbying rules.

“I have started many investigations into unregistered lobbying by in-house lobbyists, only to have to cease the investigation when it becomes apparent from the evidence that the high bar of 50 hours was not reached.”

‘More loophole than law’

The integrity commissioner found Housing Minister Steve Clark broke ethics rules and that his former chief of staff, Ryan Amato, “was the driving force behind a flawed process which provided an advantage to those who approached him.”

Wake’s report describes in revealing detail numerous meetings, messages and other contacts between prominent developers and Amato throughout last September and October that led directly to their lands being removed from the Greenbelt, most of which were never recorded as official lobbying activity.

The 50-hour threshold for in-house lobbying is “one of the biggest loopholes,” said Duff Conacher, founder of government watchdog group Democracy Watch who described Ontario’s lobbying law -- the Lobbyists Registration Act -- as “more loophole than law.”

“It should be called the Some Lobbyists Registration Act,” he said, “because only some lobbyists are registered.”
Wake, who renewed his call for a review of Ontario’s lobbying rules in Wednesday’s report, has repeatedly recommended reducing the 50-hour threshold before in-house lobbyists are required to register. He has not specified by how much it should be reduced.

Conacher, whose organization is highly critical of Wake for taking what they believe is a lax and secretive approach to policing lobbyists who break the rules, says there shouldn’t be any exemption from registering.

“There’s no reason to allow for secret lobbying,” he said. “It’s a recipe for corruption, waste and abuse, and the 50-hour threshold is designed to hide lobbying that politicians don’t want anyone to know about.”

Developers dined with chief of staff
Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk also called for strengthening lobbying rules in her recent report on changes to the Greenbelt, which found the province favoured certain developers in a “biased” and “non-transparent” process.

Both Wake’s and Lysyk’s reports found the rushed and disorganized process by which Amato decided which lands would be removed from the Greenbelt started at the Building Industry and Land Development (BILD) Association dinner last September, when Amato was seated at the same table as Silvio De Gasperis of TACC Developments.

De Gasperis’s daughter, who also works for the family company, told Wake they had purchased multiple tables at the event and reserved seats specifically for the housing minister’s staff.

At the dinner De Gasperis handed Amato a package with information on land in Pickering he has long wanted removed from the Greenbelt.

Amato was also approached at the event by Michael Rice, of Rice Group, who was about to finalize an $80-million purchase of 654 acres of Greenbelt land in King Township the next day.

According to Wake’s report, Rice told Amato: “Hey, if you guys are looking at the Greenbelt lands, I have something great that is the site you need to look at.” Amato later called Rice to ask him to put together an information package, which Amato personally picked up from Rice’s office.

When Amato subsequently reached out to De Gasperis’s daughter to get more information about the Pickering land, she responded with information about three more plots of land he owned in the Greenbelt, including one co-owned with another developer, who was also at the table with Amato at the BILD dinner.

Together those five sites accounted for 92 per cent of the land ultimately removed from the Greenbelt.

“These developers who had direct access to the chief of staff stood to significantly benefit financially by having received preferential treatment through the use of a biased process that was non-transparent to the public,” Lysyk’s report reads.

Amato denies any wrongdoing
A spokesperson for Premier Doug Ford said the province has accepted Lysyk’s recommendation to review the lobbyists act in order to strengthen rules around registration.

De Gasperis and Rice did not respond to questions for this story.

Amato, who resigned last week, declined to answer questions through his lawyer. He has previously denied any wrongdoing.

“I am confident that I have acted appropriately, and that a fair and complete investigation would reach the same conclusion,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

Wake is also investigating Amato, per one of Lysyk’s recommendations.

Some jurisdictions require all lobbying be registered
Other jurisdictions have similar thresholds before in-house lobbyists have to register, although details differ. British Columbia and Alberta have a 50-hour threshold, like Ontario, but those provinces include preparation time in calculating the hours spent lobbying, whereas Ontario does not.

Federally, the threshold is 20 per cent of one’s work time in a month, but Canada’s Commissioner of Lobbying recommended in 2021 that the exemption be eliminated and replaced with an obligation to register all lobbying activities by default, which is currently the case for municipal governments in Toronto and Ottawa.

The 50-hour threshold for in-house lobbyists is “just an arbitrary, made-up number that has nothing to do with how you influence people,” said Ian Stedman, who previously worked in the integrity commissioner’s office and is now an assistant professor at York University’s School of Public Policy and Administration.

Stedman emphasized that lobbying in and of itself isn’t bad. It’s often how the government learns what its constituents want, he said.

But accountability laws have not kept up with the public’s expectations for transparency, he added, citing the meeting between the developers and Amato at the BILD dinner as an example of the kind of thing the province’s lobbying rules should cover.

“That’s straight-up trying to influence in a very direct, aggressive way,” he said. “I think the public expects the laws would capture something like that, particularly when the significance of the decision being made as a result of that lobbying effort is so severe.”

Mr. X’s lobbying under the microscope
Most of the lobbying described in Lysyk’s and Wake’s reports are by the developers themselves or their staff, who would only have to register their lobbying if they met the 50-hour threshold.

But Wake’s report also found that an unregistered consultant, whom he anonymized as “Mr. X,” was hired by landowner Peter Tanenbaum for the express purpose of getting his lands removed from the Greenbelt and rezoned for housing. If he was successful, Mr. X would be paid $1 million on top of his $6,000-per-month fee, Wake’s report states.

Tanenbaum’s lands, 86 acres near Nash Rd. in Clarington, were among the 15 sites removed from the Greenbelt.

The report details how Mr. X had lunch with Clark’s deputy chief of staff at an Eaton Centre restaurant last September, and that Mr. X gave her a package that she subsequently provided to Amato.

Wake notes that the province’s lobbying rules prohibit lobbying “when payment is contingent on the degree of success in lobbying,” and that he will “deal with the possible non-compliance” in a separate investigation.

The results of that investigation will only be made public if Wake determines a violation occurred and, even then, only if he believes it’s in the public’s interest to disclose it.