Readers who aren’t fixated on Ontario politics (bless your hearts) may only be passingly familiar with the recent debacle at Queen’s Park over “The Greenbelt.”
This is a broad swath of undeveloped land surrounding the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area. The Greenbelt was created – or rather, designated – by the former Liberal government in 2005 under Dalton McGuinty. McGuinty was always keen to brandish his wonkish environmentalist credentials – so much so that, to his government’s credit, Ontario’s coal-fired power plants were gradually shut down, resulting in the virtual elimination of “smog days” which constituted a genuine threat to public health, especially in urban centres like Toronto.
On the downside, the McGuinty government simultaneously embarked on a program of immensely costly subsidies for wind and solar to compensate for taking coal “offline,” which to this day don’t deliver (ask Germany), resulting in a crash scheme to build gas-fired plants, two of which led to a NIMBY-political firestorm which ultimately triggered his resignation. But that’s a story for another day.
Meanwhile, back on the Greenbelt: Doug Ford campaigned and won election in 2018 in part on a pledge not to develop the region for housing or commercial use. This was prompted by long-running suspicions that he was too cozy with developers, many of whom, not surprisingly, are donors to the premier’s Progressive Conservative party.
Then, lo and behold, last fall, his Housing Minister Steve Clark announced a plan to hive off 7,400 acres out of the Greenbelt total of two million for housing development – this has been estimated at 0.3 percent – while compensating with 9,400 acres elsewhere.
A perfect storm ensued, fueled by (in no particular order): the aforementioned concerns about Ford’s connections to big-league developers; heightened environmental awareness generally, spurred on by the usual placard-waving suspects – “Hands off our Greenbelt!”; a hostile news media; investigations by the provincial Auditor General and Integrity Commissioner; and subsequent disclosures that the housing minister’s chief of staff was playing freelance footsie with developers over which parcels of the Greenbelt to slice off, with the prospect of huge profits and few or no environmental or financial impact analyses.
The fallout: Two ministerial resignations and the departure of a senior Premier’s Office advisor and ministerial aide. Oh, and this: a public statement from the premier that yes, the whole thing was a mistake, that no, it’s now hands off the Greenbelt entirely, and that he was “very, very, sorry” for the whole debacle.
There then followed the usual gerbil-wheel dynamic of most reporters: Doug Ford is castigated for plowing ahead on his plan, only to be ridiculed as a “flip-flopper” when he changes course.
When he was first elected, Doug Ford was called “a populist” – usually in the most pejorative sense – and in some cases he earned it. Remember “Buck a Beer”? But in the years since, he and his government seem to have evolved into a centrist operation which in some ways is indistinguishable from its Liberal predecessors. Especially when it comes to spending.
All the same, it means that governments like Ford’s eventually settle into “muddling-through” mode. And that can bring its own improvisational hazards. As a case in point, at the onset of the Great Depression, FDR instructed his cabinet and staff to “Try something! And if it doesn’t work, try something else!”
None of this is to say that I’m likening Doug Ford to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Or that the Greenbelt fiasco doesn’t smell fishy. We’ll all know soon enough, owing to ongoing or possible investigations.
The thing to bear in mind, though, is that gambits like these are also driven by the stark reality that absurd immigrant quotas announced by the Trudeau government will put immense pressure on Ontario’s housing supply (a plurality settle in the GTA, after all) at a time when we obviously can’t house our own. Never mind the intolerable pressure those newcomer flows will put on health care and other public services.
All, apparently, the result of the feds’ peculiar logic on this file, which essentially says: “We need more immigrants to build housing for more immigrants.”
So, as always, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. What a business.
ACTRA winner Peter Varley is a veteran communicator, having served three Premiers, among others.
