EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a new Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Premier Doug Ford is confident no one broke any laws or did anything corrupt when deciding which lands to remove from the Greenbelt last fall.
But if the RCMP launches an investigation, he won't shrug it off.
“If they decide to investigate, they haven't decided yet but if they do, I take it very serious — extremely serious. And I have zero tolerance if there was any nonsense going on,” Ford said, when he faced down reporters in a scrum at Queen's Park Friday.
Below is an exchange between Ford and Global News reporter Colin D'Mello during the premier's scrum with reporters at Queen's Park on Friday.
The Progressive Conservative government has been embroiled in controversy since Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk came out with a damning report on the Greenbelt decision earlier this month, which she called “seriously flawed” and “biased.”
Ryan Amato, Housing Minister Steve Clark’s former chief of staff, had “substantial control” over the process and gave “preferential treatment” to developers with “direct access” to him, the auditor’s report said.
About 92 per cent of the land removed from the Greenbelt was proposed to Amato by two prominent developers — and PC donors — who sat with him at an industry dinner last September. Less than two months later, the government unveiled plans to take 7,400 acres out of the protected area. Altogether, the owners of the 15 parcels of land stand to make more than $8 billion from the government’s decision, the auditor reported.
Ford and Clark have maintained neither knew what Amato was doing, despite Ford telling Clark to “complete work to codify processes for swaps, expansions, contractions and policy updates for the Greenbelt” by fall 2022 in Clark’s post-election mandate letter.
The premier’s office also told Amato to “direct a project to change the Greenbelt boundary,” Lysyk’s audit found.
“I don't believe in micromanaging,” Ford said on Friday when asked how he was out of the loop. “I believe in delegating, delegating work through our ministers and their teams.”
Amato resigned his position earlier this week, shortly before news broke that the OPP was handing off a potential investigation to the RCMP to avoid an appearance of a conflict of interest. The OPP had been reviewing whether to investigate for months and the RCMP also hasn't decided whether to launch a full investigation.
Ford didn't have any contact with the OPP before it referred the issue to the RCMP, he said on Friday.
He also addressed a criticism dogging the Tories during the entire Greenbelt fiasco: why he decided to open parts of the protected area after promising not to during the 2018 election campaign.
In February 2018, before the campaign started, Ford was caught on video telling a group of donors a PC government would open up "a big chunk" of the Greenbelt to development.
That ignited a firestorm and Ford quickly walked the comments back, at least for the time being, promising several times over the next three years not to touch the Greenbelt.
On Friday, he defended his decision by saying circumstances have changed.
"That was five years ago," he said of his original Greenbelt promise. He noted that Ontario's growing fast and federal immigration targets are way higher, putting enormous strain on Ontario's existing housing woes.
Below is an exchange between Ford and Trillium editor-in-chief Jessica Smith Cross
However, the federal government's new immigration targets were announced months after he started the process of opening the Greenbelt, and Numerous expert reports have said Ontario can reach its 1.5 million homes by 2031 target without carving up the Greenbelt
The auditor general's report noted the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing had allocated all of the supply needed to reach its target to individual municipalities in October 2022, the month before the Greenbelt changes were announced.
"Most of the solution must come from densification," the government's own housing affordability task force report said. "Greenbelts and other environmentally sensitive areas must be protected, and farms provide food and food security. Relying too heavily on undeveloped land would whittle away too much of the already small share of land devoted to agriculture."
Separate earlier reports released by the Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario, as well as Environmental Defence, have also suggested Greenbelt land doesn’t need to be built on for Ontario to reach its main housing goal.
-With files from Charlie Pinkerton
