Will the cops or the courts stop Doug Ford’s Greenbelt plan?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings To begin a brief history of promises made regarding the topic of today’s episode, here’s promise number one, made before Doug Ford became Premier of Ontario. We will open up the Green, though not all of it, and we’re going to start building. Here is promise number two, made by still not quite yet Premier Doug Ford. After he was raked over the coals for promise number one. Doug Ford is now backing off the idea. In fact, earlier today, he tweeted out this the people have spoken. We will maintain the Green Belt in its entirety. And then this past November, we had promise number three, which was not so much a promise as an announcement. That promise number one was back on. The Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Steve Clark, issuing a statement saying the government will be launching a consultation on proposed changes to the Green Belt for responsible growth and help build at least 50,000 new homes. That brings us to this December, when lots and lots of people and organizations promised to fight Ford’s development of the Green Belt with everything they had. There were protests at Queen’s Park, there were political challenges, there was a lot of investigative reporting, and there was all sorts of yelling. And that has led to a wide array of gambits aimed at keeping the Green Belt green. Those attempts began to bear fruit last week with this a spokesperson for the Ontario Provincial Police say its antiracist branch has received requests to conduct an investigation into the Ford government’s decision to open up parts of the Greenbelt for development. The potential OPP investigation is not the only investigation into this deal, and the investigations are not the only threats to Ford’s plans. There is now a court case as well. So as Ontario gets ready for perhaps the biggest environmental brawl in its history, which of these gambits have a chance at succeeding any of them? How likely, really, is a police investigation or a judicial ruling, or a provincial change of heart? What will 2023 bring for the strangest saga in Canada’s largest province? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Emma Mcintosh is an Ontario reporter for the Narwhal who has been covering the Green Belt story since basically before it was a story. Is that fair to say, Emma?

Emma McIntosh Yeah, that’s right. I’m a little obsessed. It’s a problem.

Jordan Well, we’ve had you on the show to discuss it before, and I won’t ask you to explain the entire saga. But for those who missed it in November, and for those outside Ontario, before we get to the huge fight happening now, can you quickly explain what the Green Belt is and what the provincial government in Ontario is attempting to do with it?

Emma McIntosh Absolutely. So the Green Belt is this big ring of protected land that kind of encircles the greater Toronto area, and also, like Hamilton and niagara. It kind of roughly follows the outline of the Niagara Escarpment and this other rocky ridge called the Oak Ridges Moraine, and it basically protects a whole bunch of forests and wetlands and waterways and farmland, which is also super important. It was created in 2005 by the provincial government as kind of this recognition that urban sprawl could not go on forever, that we had to set aside a little bit, at least, so that we didn’t accidentally use it all up. And it was controversial when it first happened, for sure, but over the years, ontarians have really come to love the Green Belt. They’ve really, really loved it, and so much so that it was actually like a very controversial moment. When Doug Ford, before he became premier, announced that he planned to cut into it, it was such a huge, swift backlash that he immediately backed down. But then in November, Doug Ford came back and said, actually, I am going to cut into the Green Belt, but we’re going to do it as a land swap. So the basic gist of it is that he would take out these 15 snippets of land, about 7400 acres of it, and then swap back in 9400 acres of other land elsewhere. That was, as it turns out, already protected anyways, so maybe not the best deal. And all this happened in a Whirlwind, and everyone investigated it and found out the developers would benefit from it. And it has not really slowed down since.

Jordan Yes, it’s basically been a story a week or more than that, about people fighting back, people including yourself and your colleagues at the Narwhal investigating this deal, reporting those connections you mentioned, maybe tell me about all the opposition you mentioned, how much Ontarians love the Green Belt, who’s fighting against this plan and why?

Emma McIntosh It’s really been a broad coalition. And that’s one of the interesting things here. There’s, of course, the usual suspects, right? Like, all the environmental groups are organizing and all the opposition parties are getting into it. Sure. But it’s also people that you wouldn’t expect. Like who? Well, okay, first of all, the Ontario Society of Professional Engineer. Now, that’s a weird one because that’s a group of people who would probably be involved with building the housing that Doug Ford wants to build on these snippets of Green Belt because it’s all about solving the housing crisis for him. Right. These are people who might gain financially from this. But I don’t know if you know many engineers, Jordan I have some engineers in my life, and the one thing they hate is doing things without evidence. And so this Society of Professional Engineers said, this is a bad idea. This has not undergone environmental and economic analysis, and we do not support it. That was an eyebrow raiser for me. Parks Canada came out of the woodwork and was like, hey, we’re mad about this because some of the Green Belt land that has been opened up for development is right next to Rouge Urban National Park. And they say that that could have a negative impact on that beloved place. There’s also, like, a Ford government appointee named Doug Vardy, who is the head of this Species at Risk Council, generally like a conservative guy, not someone who’s big into protesting. And he came out of nowhere and said, hey, I’m resigning because I cannot abide by this. This is bad. And he told me that he’s hearing all this feedback from people in business, people in all these circles that don’t normally get involved in environmental politics. So I feel like we’re just at the beginning of all the wackiness that’s going to come with this.

Jordan Has the Ford government addressed the myriad groups opposing this since making the announcement in November?

Emma McIntosh Not specifically, but they have kind of laid out their main argument for it and it kind of falls along a few points. So, first of all, Ontario is in a housing crisis. Yes, that is true. Absolutely we are. The Housing Minister, Steve Clark has said, hey, that housing crisis is worse than it was four years ago, and we have to try everything that we can to get more homes built. And I think that might resonate with a lot of people. One thing I’d flag is that they’re talking about building 50,000 homes on this green belt land, and that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the like 1.5 million that we’re going to have to build to actually get out of this. But even setting that aside, all the task forces that have looked at this issue have said that land supply isn’t a problem. So that’s one thing. And the Ford government has also argued, hey, we’re actually swapping in more green belt land, so this is a net benefit. But then that goes back to that problem. I mentioned earlier that the land that they’re adding back into the green belt wasn’t really in danger of being developed anyway. And some of the land we’re losing is extremely valuable farmland. So I guess it’s up to people to decide whether that’s a good deal or not. So that’s where the sides stand and that’s kind of the pros and the cons. The reason we’re talking to you now is because this past week, the Ontario Provincial Police became involved, at least potentially, in this fight.

Jordan Can you explain how that happened and what their purpose is?

Emma McIntosh Yeah, so this was really a twist. Not the way I was expecting to start the year, but the whole thing kind of goes back to some stuff that went down in November. So we worked at the Narwhal with our friends at the Toronto Star to investigate who would benefit from this proposed development in the green Belt. And we found that a bunch of developers with ties to the Ford government had actually bought green belt land that couldn’t be developed in the last four years. One of them had even bought it as recently as September. And that really raised some public outrage. I think once that came out, I think once that came out, people really started asking, did this all happen in a way that was above board? Did developers have advanced notice that this was going to happen? The Ford government didn’t help. They kind of just didn’t respond to that for a couple of weeks. And then once the criticism reached a real fever pitch, they came out and said, oh no, we didn’t tell any developers, no worries. But by then everyone was already mad. And so here and there we started hearing about people who were writing to the Ontario Provincial Police, asking them to investigate. And that in itself doesn’t mean that the cops are actually going to listen, right? I mean, I could write to the police and ask them to investigate why my neighbours keep cranking up the thermostat in the building to 78. Like, doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it, but our friends at Global news found out last week that the cops have actually started quietly conducting interviews and trying to figure out whether they want to start a full blown investigation. And it’s a unit that looks at racketeering issues, complex frauds, and yeah, I mean, we might never hear more updates on this ever. Right. The cops can work very quietly and that’s kind of needed because it kind of ruins the whole thing. Everyone knows exactly what they’re doing and what they know, but that will be something we’re watching for sure. Do we know or have police said, and I assume they haven’t because they kind of keep it close to the vest, what they would need to determine to open that investigation, because right now, yeah, it’s potentially, we might maybe investigate. We’re looking at it, and that’s interesting to hear, but doesn’t mean a hill of beans. Yeah, I think that’s the right way to think about it. The cops basically would want to see that there’s actual evidence that there’s more than just innuendo here. That doesn’t mean, you know, that they have to determine that there’s definitely fire, not just smoke, but they’d want to see like, some very strong, reliable smoke, maybe. The other thing is, this might totally go nowhere. They might look at this and go, we don’t have any reason to think anything happened here. Last we heard, they hadn’t even been in touch with the Premier’s office yet, or with the government. And so we don’t even really know what stage they’re at or how deeply they’re looking into this. We do know that they said to Environmental Defense, which is one of the groups that complained about this, that they’re maybe going to decide that this month. But I mean, just to give you an example of how slow these things can be, before I reported in Ontario, I covered the Alberta government and the former premier Jason Kenney. We were hearing for a really long time that RCMP were considering investigating him over this, like voter fraud allegation thing and like that’s still going on. It’s been four years since since I left Alberta and it’s still going on. So really we have no idea what’s going to happen here or how long it might take. But of course, they are not the only entity that’s investigating this. They might hear more about other potential investigations sooner.

Jordan What might that be?

Emma McIntosh So, because this can be looked at through so many different lenses, people have also asked other watchdogs to take a look at this. The big ones are Ontario’s auditor General and the Integrity Commissioner. So they’re kind of looking at it from these two separate, smaller angles. They’re not looking at criminal wrongdoing. The question of whether anything broke the law. The Auditor General is like her name says, she’s an auditor. So she’s looking at whether things happened according to process here, basically. But right now she’s trying to decide whether she wants to do that. And if she actually does decide to audit this whole thing, we’ll hear about that for sure. Like, she will let us know. And then the Integrity Commissioner a whole separate thing. He’s looking at whether any MPPs broke ethics rules, whether they let developers know in advance that this was happening and therefore violated the code of conduct, basically, that they’re bound by the rules for him. And the way he operates are a little stricter. He has to issue a report explaining why he does or does not think an investigation is required. So we’ll hear about that one too. So that’s nice. We’ll know more. And so the Integrity Commissioner, according to the process, is like right now, looking at conducting some of those interviews, looking at the preliminary evidence that’s when not a lot of things really progress to the level of an Integrity Commissioner investigation. And it’s pretty rare for them to find any wrongdoing there. But because the Integrity Commissioner can compel interviews with people who would not normally agree to sit down with a journalist like me, we might find out some really interesting things about how this played out behind the scenes at a very minimum.

Jordan So those covered the investigations by various bodies into how this deal went down, which is interesting, and we will wait for the results. And to your point, might be absolutely nothing, but that’s not the only thing that’s going on. One of the other reasons we wanted to talk to you about this is because there’s a whole other attempt to stop some of this that began this week. And it’s a whole different tactic. Can you tell us about what Eco Justice is doing and why?

Emma McIntosh Happily, this just never stops hate there’s so much that’s why we had you back. Because there’s now like four different ways that people are fighting this and we need to break it down yeah. So Eco Justice, and they’re representing in this case, the charity Environmental Defense, they have started the latest attempt to stop some of this, actually through the courts. So if you haven’t heard of Eco Justice before, they’re basically a nonprofit legal clinic. They take on environmental cases. And what they’re doing is they’re asking a judge to basically make this big four government decision that relates to the green belt invalid. And it is about the green belt, but it’s also about this other issue which is related, that’s kind of around urban sprawl. We’re going to get so nerdy on this, Jordan, but just stick with me for a second, okay? We’ll get to the point, I swear. So if you think about driving out of a city, whether you live in one or you visited one, you know, like when you’re on your way out, you hit that point where the buildings and the houses, they all kind of fall away and you hit farmers fields. You know what I’m talking about there. So that’s an urban boundary. And in Ontario, municipalities or cities or our regions, they all have a set urban boundary, that point that you notice when you’re driving. And one thing that the foreign government asked those cities to do this year was figure out how much land they were going to need until 2051, basically. Is your urban boundary enough? Do you have enough land within it? And there’s a whole episode probably to be done about how this whole thing went down. And you should call my colleague Fatima Syed for that.

Jordan We do often.

Emma McIntosh Yes, I do, all the time. And so the foreign government basically gave these communities a formula to use to figure out how much land they were going to need based on how many people were expected to move there. And one complaint we heard from the cities is that the formula basically meant that you are probably going to have to grow that urban boundary. But Hamilton, and it’s a community next to it called Halton, both decided that they didn’t want to expand that urban boundary. They were not interested. And there’s like a host of environmental reasons for that. Right. Sprawl kind of encourages those car trips that are bad for climate change. It also eats up green space, which releases more carbon into the atmosphere as well. Right. There are other ways to increase population without necessarily increasing the boundaries, or at least that’s their point. Exactly. And so these two communities both decided, we’re not doing that. We’re going to make our cities denser instead to accommodate all these new people who are going to move here. And once they did this, the foreign government was not happy. The Housing Minister, Steve Clark, kind of threatened to override their decision and impose his will on them anyway. And it kind of stuck like that for about a year in this weird standoff. But the exact same day that they opened up the green belt. The government also announced that it was indeed going to make good on its threat and it was going to impose Sprawl on Hamilton and Halton. And so to bring it back full circle, Eco Justice is asking a judge to render that invalid and to say, this was not a good decision, this doesn’t comply with the provincial policy and you should strike it down, but only with Hamilton. Not with Hamilton. Why Hamilton? And on what grounds, I guess, are they bringing this forward? Hamilton is a really interesting case because it was a super democratic decision. The city held a ton of public engagement and citizens got really involved. All this grassroots opposition sprung up and people made it really clear that they did not want to see more Sprawl, that they wanted to see the downtown core get denser instead. And it was just such a beautiful, rare case of people actually getting involved in local politics, which, as you’ve talked about before, never happens, people never care. But they did this time. And so I think that that’s kind of adding to the egregiousness of this, that this was actually a pretty democratic decision and that the four government just kind of tore it up in one fell swoop. In terms of the actual argument, what Eco Justice is saying here is that the minister’s decision to impose his will on the city actually isn’t compliant with other provincial policies. So that gets all in the weeds. But there are this whole other set of provincial policies that say things like, we should try to avoid Sprawl, we should try to have denser communities. And then there’s other things around public consultation, which they say that the minister didn’t do. One great quote is that they say the minister’s decision is unreasonable, is lacking in transparency, intelligibility and justification. And if you’ve ever read legal documents before, you know that’s like about the biggest burn they could have written. That’s how that’s going to go down.

Jordan The other thing I want to quickly ask about, just because it’s interesting that it’s the city of Hamilton fighting this. The city of Hamilton has a recently elected mayor named Andrea Horwath, who of course, was the former NDP leader, who of course, was the official opposition to Premier Ford. And they don’t get along really well. How much of that could be at play here?

Emma McIntosh Yeah, they’re definitely not good, pals. Hamilton’s new mayor, Andrea Horwath, was against the Ford government getting involved in this before she became mayor, when she was leading the NDP, and she is against it now. But I don’t know if that’s part of why Ford did it, but I know, yeah, it’s certainly something that he’s been threatening for a while. And that’s the weird thing, too, because part of the trouble with this is that the Ford government passed this down right when new councils had been elected, including Andrea Horwath, the mayor. And so they hadn’t even been sworn in yet. It’s like when someone starts yelling at you and you’ve just gotten out of bed, it’s like, whoa, what is even going on here? That’s why we haven’t even really seen a lot of action on this yet, even though it happened two months ago, because people had to get sworn in, city lawyers had to look at it. Andrew Horror has said city lawyers are still looking at it. But it’s really interesting that Eco Justice is the one pursuing this lawsuit and not the city. And that’s kind of because of the way the law is designed, the way it is. In Ontario, cities are kind of like they’re always described as pets of the province. It’s just the way the law is, right? It’s like if the province does jump, cities kind of have to say, like, how okay, how high? So they need somebody to fight for them because they can’t fight the province directly. That’s kind of what Andrea Horwath seems to be saying, that she doesn’t see a lot of avenues for them to really push it forward. Of course, activists are still trying to fight it and trying to hold up applications that might go in for that land. But yeah, it’s going to be a crazy couple of years there too. The Hamilton Spectator, an amazing local paper, has found that the the areas of land where sprawl will now be allowed have already been snapped up in many cases by developers. And they actually found one case where a guy got like, three offers in a single day for his farm. And so these are truly wild times in land development in the greater Toronto area. And who knows how long this court case will take and whether it’ll even succeed, or even if it does, doug Ford can always pull the notwithstanding clause again. A whole other can of worms. He can basically say, we’re not listening to that. And so I really think we’re in for one heck of a ride.

Jordan And so there’s so many different cans of worms as we’ve covered in this conversation, and this is my last question, is basically just like, what happens now and on what timeline you mentioned the land is already being sold. Presumably development will start at some point, or at least people will try to start it. Obviously, once the land gets cleared and those shovels go in the ground, you can’t really get the green belt back. It’s one thing to fight in court. It’s a whole other to have machines taking out trees and putting shovels in the ground and et cetera, et cetera. At some point, these two paths are going to come head on.

Emma McIntosh No, yeah, you’re absolutely right. The short answer is probably not. It probably can’t be stopped at this point. I think it would take something pretty huge, like, you know, the federal government stepping in somehow to make this stop and to make it halt in its tracks. But there are some other things at play here. So the Ford government has given developers a pretty short timeline to actually build on the green belt land that they’ve now opened up for development. They’ve got to show substantial progress pretty quickly, and then they’ve got to have actual stubbles in the ground within like, two years. If you talk to people in land development, that’s crazy. That’s so fast. And when you factor in that a lot of these parcels of land aren’t even serviced yet. They don’t even have connections to electricity or sewage. That also takes time, and we don’t know what the province is going to count as proof that they’re actually building stuff yet. Right, so that’s one thing. But they have said that if the developers don’t finish things on that required timeline, that they’ll return the land to the green belt. So that’s one thing.

Jordan So we’ll get a lot of half dug foundations as part of the green belt that we can let nature take back over.

Emma McIntosh Oh, God, I hope not. Once things are paved, though, they’re paved, right. It’s not easy to rip it up and say, like, all right, nature have it back. Until shovels go in the ground, all bets are off. But we’re kind of racing towards that right now.

Jordan Emma, thank you so much for this. I feel like I understand it a whole lot better now. Well, I’m glad because I feel like I barely know what’s going on. So it’s been nice. It’s like a therapy session.

Jordan Emma Mcintosh, Ontario Reporter for the Narwhal. You can find a conversation between Emma and her colleague Fatima Syed in our archives from this past November. If you want to know a little bit more about what the proposed deal looks like and what the potential environmental impact could be, it’s a great conversation. You should go check it out. And as I always like to say, you should go check out The Narwhal. They do really important work. You can check out our important work at The Big Storypodcast CA. It’s not quite as important, but it’s still fun. You can talk to us on Twitter at The Big story. FPN. You can email us hello at The Big Story podcast CA, and you can call us and leave a voicemail 4169-3559 the Big Stories in every podcast player and every smart speaker. And it’s been a while since I asked you to grace us with a written review in any podcast player that you like. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.