To the Toronto Star, it was clear and simple — “Fire Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark, halt the development of Greenbelt lands and call in the cops.”
What else would one expect from a newspaper that sees anything conservative to be a blight?
But, in this case, it might be right about calling in the cops.
After all, there are sidebar issues that are interesting.
A former chief of staff to Ontario Housing Minister Steve Clark suddenly parted ways with an influential lobby group for the residential construction industry.
On August 1, the Ontario Home Builders’ Association (OHBA) told its members in a rather terse letter that Luca Bucci is no longer its CEO, effective that same day, with no reason given.
Some nine days later, a bombshell dropped. Developers in Ontario had direct influence over the province’s decision to extract lands from the Greenbelt and received “preferential treatment,” said Ontario’s auditor general in a blistering special report that showed the Ontario government of Ontario Premier Doug Ford began working to remove protected land as soon as it won re-election.
The Ford government unveiled plans to remove 7,400 total acres of land in 15 parcels from the Greenbelt on Nov. 4, and later finalized them in December.
The end result is that the owners of 15 parcels of land removed from the Greenbelt will see the value balloon by $8.3 billion, according to the auditor general.
The explosive report from Bonnie Lysyk into the government’s dealings with developers comes after a six-month investigation and interviews with key players in the controversial decision, including Ford, who denied any wrongdoing.
The report, however, makes a definitive link between the Premier’s Office, the housing minister, a central political staffer who drove the project, and developers who benefitted from the deal.
That staffer would be Ryan Amato, Clark’s chief-of-staff, who is writ large in Lysyk’s 95-page special report.
As written in The Trillium, Lysyk found that about 92% of the land removed from Ontario’s signature-protected area last year was made up of five sites that had been proposed to Amato by two developers who sat with him at an industry dinner in September 2022.
“The exercise to change the Greenbelt boundaries in Fall 2022 cannot be described as a standard or defensible process,” Lysyk wrote in her report.
Lysyk’s report, said the Trillium, seems to contradict many claims the premier and housing minister have made about how the government determined what land to remove from the Greenbelt last year.
Ford and Clark were defiant Wednesday. They acknowledged the process of selecting the sites was flawed and rushed, but Ford said the ends justified the means.
“We’ve admitted many times today and I’ll continue to admit that we’re going to correct the process,” Ford said. “But what matters to the people of Ontario is making sure they can afford a home, an attainable home, an affordable home, a regular home like a condo or a rental.”
In the Toronto Star’s lead editorial, the one which called for ringing up the cops, it was stated that Ford and Clark were either not being truthful or they displayed a dereliction of political responsibilities.
“If they truly didn’t know, at some point during Lysyk’s probe, they would have learned the damning truth about their Greenbelt land transfer,” said the Star.
“Yet publicly, they continued their sham defence of the exercise.”
