Doug Ford’s Tories brace for the next wave of Greenbelt scandal

Premier Doug Ford’s $8.28-billion Greenbelt land swap scandal -- already under criminal investigation by the RCMP -- is about to enter a new phase.

Thestar.com
Oct. 30, 2023
Robert Benzie

Premier Doug Ford’s $8.28-billion Greenbelt land swap scandal -- already under criminal investigation by the RCMP -- is about to enter a new phase that has Progressive Conservatives worried.

Thousands of pages of documents are expected to be released Monday under freedom of information legislation that could shine more light on a controversy preoccupying the government.

As first disclosed by the Star last week, Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra has been moving quickly to clean up the mess he inherited from predecessor Steve Clark, who resigned from cabinet in September.

“Paul’s doing the right thing, but you can’t really pre-empt what’s coming,” said a senior Tory, speaking confidentially in order to discuss internal deliberations.

That was a reference to Calandra’s surprise cancellation last Monday of Clark’s changes to official city plans in Hamilton, Barrie, Ottawa, Peel, York, and Durham regions, among other municipalities.

Those boundary amendments -- against the will of local councils -- were designed to increase the amount of urban land zoned for housing development.
But Calandra expressed concern about how the properties chosen to be included were selected.

“Ultimately what we should be guided by is the provincial planning statement. The reason I made the decisions to reverse some of those changes to official plans is because I didn’t feel that they met the spirit that is important to bring public trust with you,” he said last week.

“When reviewing how decisions were made regarding official plans, it is clear that they failed to meet this test.”

The Tories have been scrambling to undo the damage caused by the Greenbelt affair since the summer, Ford’s most politically miserable season since winning power in June 2018.

In August, separate reports from the auditor general and the integrity commissioner concluded “certain developers” were “favoured” when the premier decided to open up 7,400 acres of the two-million-acre protected Greenbelt for housing construction.

The legislative watchdogs exposed a flawed process in which Clark’s chief of staff, Ryan Amato, personally selected the properties chosen to be removed from the Greenbelt after meetings with developers.

Amato resigned two weeks before his boss finally stepped down on Labour Day.

Another minister, Kaleed Rasheed, and a top aide, Ford’s housing policy adviser Jae Truesdell, have also been forced to quit.

While Rasheed was defenestrated from the PC caucus, Clark still sits as a Tory MPP.

On Sept. 21, in a major policy flip-flop, a chastened premier finally cancelled the Greenbelt land swap scheme.

“It was a mistake to open the Greenbelt. I’m very, very sorry. I made a promise to you that I wouldn’t touch the Greenbelt. I broke that promise,” Ford said that day.

“As a first step to earning back your trust, I’ll be reversing the changes. We moved too quickly and we made the wrong decision … it caused people to question our motives.”

While his contrition appears to be helping the Tories bounce back in public-opinion polls, the expected release of thousands of emails from the Clark-era minister’s office has the government skittish.

Adding insult to injury, NDP Leader Marit Stiles on Monday morning will outline how some developers who attended the wedding of one of Ford’s daughter last year received minister’s zoning orders (MZOs) that made their land more valuable.

Reviving an issue that first exploded in February, Stiles denounced the “corrupt pattern of gifting … MZOs to well-connected insiders.”

At his news conference last week to cancel the municipal boundary changes, Calandra confirmed he was reviewing all of the MZOs, but stressed “the vast majority I’m not concerned with.”

Since taking office five years ago, Ford has used the orders that override local planning authorities more times than the previous Liberal, Progressive Conservative and NDP governments did in three decades.

Last week, Stiles made Tory MPPs visibly uncomfortable during the legislature’s question period when she taunted them by recounting that Ontario PC Fund Chair Tony Miele sold $150 tickets to the bachelor party for the fiancé of Ford’s daughter.

Miele was one of dozens of Tory insiders interviewed by the integrity commissioner for the 166-page report on the Greenbelt scandal.