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In the auditor general’s report on the Greenbelt, she writes, “To maintain public trust and confidence, the government and its ministries need to show that they are transparent in decision making, and that they act fairly in the interests of all Ontarians. Not only do the people of Ontario care about what is done; they equally care about how things are done.”
The Ontario government’s process for choosing protected Greenbelt land to open up for housing development was heavily influenced by a small group of well-connected developers who now stand to make billions of dollars. Developers could see an $8-billion increase to the value of land now open for housing development, the AG report finds, and that how the land sites were selected was not transparent, fair, objective, or fully informed. It also can be shown that there was sufficient land for the target of 1.5 million homes to be built without the need to build on the Greenbelt.
Premier Doug Ford, these lands that you removed from the Greenbelt should be returned to the Greenbelt and not developed by your developer buddies to fill their greedy pockets.
In the 95-page report released Wednesday, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk offered a damning assessment of how the Province of Ontario selected sites last year for removal from the Greenbelt. The AG report states, “Our review ... raises serious concerns about the exercises used, the way in which standard information gathering and decision protocols were sidelined and abandoned, and how changes to the Greenbelt were unnecessarily rushed through … The process was biased in favour of certain developers and landowners who had timely access to the housing minister’s chief of staff.”
The selection process was largely controlled by Housing Minister Steve Clark’s chief of staff — not non-partisan public servants — and many of the sites were chosen after specific suggestions from specific developers, likely friends of your Progressive Conservative government. The process didn’t consider the agricultural, environmental and financial impacts of the decision, and involved little input from planning experts or other stakeholders, including the general public and Indigenous communities, according to the report.
The Ontario government should revisit the land swaps and reverse those decisions. The auditor general’s report found that after the Progressive Conservatives won the June 2022 election in a landslide, Doug Ford directed Clark in a mandate letter to “complete work to codify processes for swaps, expansions, contractions and policy updates for the Greenbelt.” The housing ministry provided Clark’s chief of staff with two options: an overall review of the Greenbelt or the selection of specific sites, the AG wrote in her report. The audit revealed that Clark’s chief of staff directed a small team of housing ministry bureaucrats in October 2022 that decided which sites would be removed. The work of the so-called Greenbelt Project Team was limited to three weeks and its members were sworn to confidentiality, according to the report. The AG found it was Clark’s chief of staff who identified 21 of the 22 sites the team considered. Ultimately, they settled on 15.
Doug Abernethy
Gravenhurst