The Decibel - Ford accused of playing favourites in Greenbelt plans

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

On Wednesday, Ontario’s Auditor-General, Bonnie Lysyk released an investigative report into the province’s decision to open up 3,000 hectares of its protected Greenbelt area for development. The Ford government claims this will be beneficial for the housing crisis but her report found that they have a different agenda.Jeff Gray is a Queen’s Park reporter for The Globe and Mail and he will be talking to us about the problems around the Greenbelt plan and where the Ford government went wrong.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Okay, so I want to start by reading an email that I sent to you on Tuesday before this report was released. Okay, so bear with me. I'm going to read this email. It says, Hey Jeff! How goes it? I saw your story about the imminent AG report on the Greenbelt and wondering, is it going to be interesting? Worth a show? So? What did I say? Jeff Gray is the Globe's Ontario provincial politics reporter. And I wanted to talk to him about a long awaited report from Ontario's auditor general that was recently released.

I want to ask you something. We sometimes call things in this news biz like a nothing burger. So I'm just wondering, was this a nothing burger? Oh, no, no. by no means, no. It confirms, it colors in the outlines of what people already knew or suspected or believed about just what happened when Doug Ford reversed his many promises to not touch the protected greenbelt lands that surround the GTA. The report examines Premier Doug Ford's handling of a two million acre swath of protected forest and wetland in southern Ontario.

It's called the Greenbelt. And for years, Ford promised his government would never touch it. But now, the plan is to develop a portion of that land. And the report finds some developers got preferential treatment. Today, Jeff explains why the report is causing such a stir at Queen's Park and what it says about how the Ford government does business. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Jeff, thanks so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me. So Jeff, this Auditor General's report, which can sometimes be called dry, AG reports aren't always interesting, but this one is being called scathing. And I'm just wondering, why has this report landed in such a big way? It was eagerly anticipated by people. This Greenbelt debacle starts in last November, when the government says, surprise, everybody, we're going to pull these 15 properties, 3,000 hectares owned. They didn't say this, but as it was later revealed, owned by very wealthy, prominent developers, several of whom are very big donors to the Premier's Progressive Conservative Party. When they did that in November, all sorts of people, opposition,

politicians, environmentalists, other people were concerned about, look, some of this land changed hands very recently. Did the developers know? Should the police investigate? There are all sorts of questions like that. And that's been going on since. So in January, the opposition parties, first Marit Stiles, the leader of the NDP in Ontario, and then the other opposition parties, all of them asked the Auditor General to investigate and she agreed to do so.

People really wanted to know what happened behind the scenes. How did this decision, which seems to favor people with relationships to the governing party, to the Premier himself, how did that decision get made? So let's dive into what's in it, because this was 93 pages detailing an investigation into the four governments' handling of the Greenbelt up to this point of development. What did the report find? So the report essentially concludes that the process that the government undertook when it secretly decided to reverse its public position on allowing development on the Greenbelt, that the process was uh i think the phrase she uses seriously flawed biased um and that it favored certain developers those are strong words yeah

i mean and and when you read through what what she describes it is kind of amazing reading that this is how uh this decision was made essentially the chief of staff for Steve Clark, who's the minister of municipal affairs and housing, this chief of staff, Ryan Amato is his name, was tasked with leading a team of non-political bureaucrats, civil servants in the housing and municipal affairs ministry, to try and take some land out of the greenbelt to build housing. And is that unusual? Yes. The whole process, there's nothing usual about this at all.

This was highly unusual, done very, very quickly, a three-week time period. And of the 15 properties, 14 of them were suggested by Mr. Amato to this group of civil servants who were supposed to analyze, figure out, do the mapping, figure out what property should and shouldn't be taken out. And that's also central to what the Auditor General's concluded, which is that there was preferential treatment here for the developers, the small number of developers who own almost all this land. And Mr. Amato, she tells us, got the suggestions, the idea for which lands to pull out directly from these developers at a development industry banquet. He was handed envelopes with the properties identified in documents, and he passed those on to the civil servants. So essentially the end result is, is these 14 of these 15 properties

were selected through this process that the Auditor General says it's completely flawed, totally unusual and indefensible. Yeah, so abnormal, preferential, done really quickly. I also, I'm curious on your take, what stood out to you from this report about how this government operates? Well, it fits into the pattern of the government, which has a populist hue to it.

You know, we know better than the experts and the bureaucrats and the red tape and everybody's going to get things done, get, you know, get it done was their re-election slogan. And so the sort of slapdash nature of this, having all of this decision making in the hands essentially of one political staffer, a decision that the Auditor General says has meant that a small number of developers, their lands are now worth, this is not a mistake, $8.3 billion more than they were worth the day before this Greenbelt decision was made. Just speak to that kind of shoot from the hip, slapdash, back at the olive, whatever cliche you want to use. That is something this government has run into before. That's a problem that they've had before. One thing that the Auditor General does mention

that's been seized on by a number of people is the fact that people working on this were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. Unusual, right? Which is unusual. I mean, you are already, as a member of the public service, sworn to secrecy anyway. You can already get in trouble for telling people things you're not supposed to tell them.

So, you know, maybe in some cases that you need extra layers of confidentiality. So, for instance, the budget or things that might move markets, this clearly has that kind of implication. But because of that, the Auditor General tells us, the bureaucrats, the professional civil servants, planning, people with planning expertise, and so on in that department, couldn't go and ask other colleagues who hadn't signed those what they thought of XYZ, what are the environmental implications? They couldn't go and ask the municipalities, do you have the pipes, the capacity to build the infrastructure to be ready to make these sites ready for housing quickly? So essentially keeping it in a very tight group there is what kind of came of this NDA.

I'm just wondering, so the main findings of the report are that this whole process was flawed and the province should put a pause on this before continuing. Why is the province continuing with its plan? That's also their modus operandi. They are putting their heads down and they think they can weather this. They're going ahead with it. So it's already underway. They have this tight timeline for the Greenbelt. They want the process.

They want what they call significant progress on implementation and planning and approvals and all that by the end of this year. And they want shovels in the ground by the end of next year. Or they say they'll put the land back in the Greenbelt if they can't get things done quickly. And it's important to remember the Greenbelt is huge. It's 800,000 hectares. And we're talking about 3000 hectares here. So the Greenbelt still exists. Premier Doug Ford and Minister Steve Clark did speak at a press conference after the report's release you were there um how did they respond they did a lot of repeating their uh their message about uh housing uh and that that's a that's their their line in a nutshell is look everybody

we've got a housing crisis we need to fix it we're sorry that we uh broke some of the china while we were doing that um and we're gonna we're gonna do better next time but we we we're not apologizing for moving quickly we're in we're in a wartime situation with the runaway housing prices and the lack of of home building and so on um the problem with that is that there's a whole chorus of experts, reports, uh, the regional planners in all the regions around the city of Toronto where these greenbelt extractions are happening, uh, who say that actually there's already, uh, way more land than the province will be able to build on or needs to build all these homes. It's already earmarked.

We do not have a land shortage. We have a problem with actually getting houses built. Yeah, and Jeff, actually, in this press conference, you actually did challenge Premier Ford. We have enough housing, according to a number of estimates, including bureaucrats who work for your government. The Ministry of Housing told me several years ago this was the case case they have enough housing land earmarked for two million homes the problem is we're not building we're not building fast enough and you've made other changes in that

direction why do you need to ruin everything with this problematic process that's gotten everybody upset but you may you may call I apologize Minister you may call it ruining I'm I'm calling giving people an opportunity to buy a home, to buy an affordable home. What was the response like from the Premier? The usual response. I mean, I think that the point I was sort of clumsily trying to make in my question was, this is 50,000 homes. The experts tell us you've got enough land for 2 million.

You want to build 1.5? We've got the land. This is a drop in the bucket, 50,000 homes, really in the context of that grand goal. You could build those homes somewhere else. So why go to all this trouble when the government's doing all these other things to speed up housing?

The only result uh that that it's produced so far uh is a lot of paper profits for the developers who own the land um now their response to that is well look we're going to get billions more out of these developers to build all the infrastructure that's required okay that's happening and behind closed doors now so we don't know we can't evaluate how much money the developers are putting up to compensate for this windfall that they've gotten and how much benefit the communities

and the province will get from that. We don't know, but that's their argument. And we will get, we need to do everything that we can to build as many more homes as we can in order to deal with the housing crisis. We'll be right back. So this report isn't the first investigation into Ford and his relationship with the development industry.

Earlier this year, there was another one started by the integrity commissioner into developers attending Ford family weddings and his daughter's stag and dough. Just can you remind us where are we at with that investigation? So that's on hold. the leader of the opposition, that looks at whether municipal affairs and housing minister Steve Clark tipped off developers that they were going to do this in advance. There was, of course, the whole issue about who was sitting where and who was at one of the premier's daughter's weddings. And we know that several developers were there, one of whom would later benefit from green belt removals. And that investigation, which also includes this pre-wedding event

that there were lots of news stories about, at last check, that is sort of in abeyance while the integrity commissioner looks at the central issue of whether there was any sort of wrongdoing or misbehavior with regards to the developers and knowledge of the Green Belt and that. So that investigation is still going on. But the integrity commissioner has also just been asked, one of the recommendations of

the auditor general was that the integrity commissioner should look at this chief of staff that a lot of the problems have been pinned on and see if he broke any of the rules that apply to him that are enforced by the integrity commissioner. And so one of the other things the opposition say is, hold it a minute, everybody, how on earth could the chief of staff of the of the housing minister be doing all these things on a central marquee government policy that everybody knew was going to be controversial, important,

without the direct knowledge of his superior, of the premier's office, of the premier, of Minister Clark? How could that possibly be the case? Yeah. So Jeff, these relationships

between Ford and developers have been under the microscope by reporters and the opposition for a while now. Why are these relationships under scrutiny? The development industry, much of it was not pleased with the previous liberal government, particularly near the end. Some, several, the developers we're talking about in this Greenbelt issue are very, very large donors to the PC party. It's worth remembering that other previous governments of different stripes have also had their own problems

with relationships with developers, including with donations, because the development industry needs access, needs to convince those in government. So its donation pattern switches in many cases, depending on who is actually in government, which it's also worth remembering are legal, documented, but they are large.

And the pattern of who gives to the PC party also has come up with these special orders that they can give to speed up development projects. So that's kind of where the scrutiny at the moment is focused. This government has done a lot of things that the development industry has asked it to do. Just to end here, Jeff, what is the Ford government's political strategy in dealing with the fallout? Because there has been quite a bit of fallout from this report. So what is their strategy moving forward? Well, it looks from what we're seeing, it's double down.

Nobody's going to resign. The fate of this chief of staff, they haven't said anything about him, but he is going to be investigated or he may be investigated by the integrity commissioner. So that raises a question mark around around him but at the moment we don't have any sign that the premier wants his trusted housing minister steve clark to resign and we have new pc party funded ads online and on radio that highlight the housing crisis and the need for the government to do more to build homes. On Friday, the Premier and Minister Steve Clark were in Mississauga at a construction site where they're building a supportive housing facility for homeless people.

We had them, again, going through all the other things the government is doing to try and address this issue, which is a huge issue, which is a massive issue. No question about it. Every poll will tell you that. And that seems to be their policy. They're saying, we're sorry, we're going to fix the problems the Auditor General has outlined, but we are not slowing down or stopping on our plans to build more housing. Then you get into the debate of whether these things that they're doing will actually get us anywhere near to solving the problem. The refrain is, whoops, sorry about the greenbelt stuff, but housing is so important. We just got to keep going.

And get that message out to the public. That is what their goal. I mean, it's also the middle of summer. And while it does seem people are interested in this story and we're getting a lot of feedback on it, it is also a long time in politics until the next election, which is 2026. Jeff, thanks so much for being on the show. This has been really interesting. Thanks for having me.

That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Nagin Nia is our summer producer. Our producers are Madeline White and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to

you tomorrow.