Ontario’s opposition parties are calling on the province’s housing minister to resign after the government failed to be “publicly transparent” in its plans to hand over areas of the Greenbelt to developers, according to a new report from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario.
In November 2022, the Doug Ford government announced it would be re-defining the boundaries of the Greenbelt to construct 1.5 million homes by 2031, in an effort to combat Ontario’s housing shortage.
The Greenbelt was established in 2005 to protect farmland, the environment, and limit urban sprawl. It constitutes an area of about two million acres, and encircles the Greater Golden Horseshoe region.
A legislative requirement stating that the overall size of the Greenbelt can not be reduced meant that existing protected lands eyed for development would have to be removed and then replaced by areas that were not already in the Greenbelt.
Therefore, the provincial government proposed a controversial plan to eliminate or land-swap thousands of acres to make way for construction.
The approach was met with substantial backlash from the public, the media and the legislature.
According to Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s report, during the proposal’s mandatory 30-day public deliberation period, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs received over 35,000 public responses largely in opposition to the plans.
Nonetheless, in Dec. 2022, the provincial government went ahead with the strategy as suggested, selecting 15 sites for removal.
On Jan. 11, 2023, the Auditor General received a letter from the three other Ontario political party leaders requesting a thorough and impartial assessment of the government’s decision to remove lands from the Greenbelt.
READ MORE: Ford government being investigated for Greenbelt development plan
Although the Ontario government complied with The Greenbelt Act, and did not reduce the overall area, the audit found that “the way the government assessed and selected lands for removal from and addition to the greenbelt was not publicly transparent, objective or well-informed.”
It also said that opening the Greenbelt was not a necessary step in actioning the nearly decade-long development project, because a lack of land was not the cause of the province’s housing shortage.
Moreover, nine of the 15 sites approved for removal from the Greenbelt were requested by developers, according to the report. Of the land removed, “about 92% of the acreage was from land sites passed on to the Housing Minister’s Chief of Staff from two developers,” the audit found.
As a result of the plan’s approval, owners of the land authorized for development are projected to see a collective “$8.3 billion increase in the value of their properties,” the audit said.
The auditor general’s report said the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing restricted the Greenbelt Project team to a “three-week time limit” for selecting appropriate lands for removal and prohibited them from “speaking to anyone else about their work”.
Overall, the Greenbelt Project team’s review was “limited to 22 specific sites, 21 of which were identified and provided directly by the Chief of Staff, ” the report concluded.
Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles said the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Steve Clark should be fired and the legislature recalled in light of the report.
“The Conservatives rigged the system to help a select few of their donors—to the tune of $8.3 billion, carving up our Greenbelt against expert advice, public interest, ethical standards. As a start, Minister Clark must resign,” she tweeted.
Interim Liberal Party Leader John Fraser also tweeted that Clark should “step aside.”
In a press conference on Thursday, Doug Ford said he “takes full responsibility for the process” and that it “should have been better,” in light of substantiated claims that his government did not follow protocols when delivering the housing supply action plan.
Steve Clark asserted that he was committed to “moving forward on the housing supply action plan.” He did not respond to questioning over calls for his or his chief of staff’s resignation.
