Paydirt E3: Margaritaville

Premier Doug Ford: I can tell you we have a housing crisis. The likes of witches province in this country has never seen before. And the reason we have a housing crisis? Because we have economic growth, the likes of witches province has never seen before. People choose Ontario from around the world to come here, to raise a family, to start a business, to start a better life.

Emma McIntosh: What you just heard was Ontario Premier Doug Ford responding to the release of a report from the province’s Auditor General last summer. The report that turned the Greenbelt controversy into a national scandal. The Premier’s explanation didn’t exactly pour water on the fire. Even my friends who don’t read the news regularly were suddenly sending me messages about it. A lot of people were angry.

Clip 1: Does he think we’re that stupid that he didn’t know as Minister of Housing and the premier of the province didn’t know an $8 billion land deal was cut even before.

Clip 2: So opposition leaders are now calling for the minister’s resignation and for Ford to do the right thing. So the question is what is the right thing at this stage of the game? Imagine if- I know right, the right thing, right? Since when?

Emma McIntosh: I am Emma McIntosh, I’m a reporter for The Narwhal, and for the last few weeks I’ve been taking over Mondays on The Big Story with a mini series called Paydirt, the Inside Story of Ontario’s Greenbelt Scandal. This is the final episode. We are now back where we started this story. August, 2023. The Greenbelt scandal has been brewing for a year, but now a couple of explosive reports from watchdogs turn it into a full blown crisis for Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. The first of those reports came from the Office of Ontario’s Auditor General. She spent more than half a year investigating this.

Bonnie Lysyk: I’m Bonnie Lysyk. I was the auditor general for Ontario between 2013 up until about September 3rd, 2023.

Emma McIntosh: And can you tell me the title of your last report?

Bonnie Lysyk: The title in the last report was Special Report on Changes to the Greenbelt.

Emma McIntosh: Bonnie started working on her Greenbelt audit in her final year at the office. The job is pretty much what it sounds like. She audits not just where the province spends its money, but how it makes choices to see what’s working. Whether decisions are backed by evidence. She gets to interview people who would never talk to me. She also gets to see documents the province would never voluntarily release to the public, but people aren’t always forthcoming when it comes to giving her information. For one thing. Two developers we introduced you to in episode one, Silvio De Gasperis and Michael Rice declined to be interviewed by the Auditor General or hand over their records to her.

Bonnie Lysyk: They didn’t want to meet voluntarily, so we issued them summons, which the office is totally and the auditor generals totally in the right to do. Under the Auditor General Act, it was difficult delivering the summons, and then when they were actually delivered, the lawyers obviously fought back to fight the right of the office to issue them. So I did make a conscious decision not to fight the refusal to speak to us. I believe that reporting their non-cooperation would enable the legislature, the public media and others to decide what the next step should be.

Emma McIntosh: A lawyer for TACC, Silvio De Gasperis’s company told me that in their view the summons was improper. He said the auditor wanted a lot of information. They weren’t the best source for some of it, other parts they just didn’t know. He also said TACC felt the summons was given on short notice, and he said TACC was still corresponding with the auditor General in good faith leading up to the report. In the end, Bonnie finished her report without interviewing them, her team was also working with a firm deadline. Remember Bonnie started the audit in January and was set to leave office at the end of summer. That left her around seven months, not a ton of time. The auditing team also ran into some trouble getting ahold of the records they needed. First there were delays getting access to some emails. Then they found that some of the government’s emails had been deleted. There are rules around that if you work for the government, you’re accountable to the people and part of that is retaining records of what you do. Journalists and the public don’t know whose emails were deleted, what they contained or who did it, but government employees are really, really not supposed to delete important emails. It is literally illegal.

Bonnie Lysyk: In one particular case, the email box would’ve looked like everything you’d keep was deleted and everything you would delete was kept. And it was that type of scenario that we were concerned about. But at the end of the day, I feel pretty good that a lot of the material we needed to do our work was available for our review.

Emma McIntosh: Bonnie’s team finished the audit in late July and wrapped up work on the final report in early August. They also gave the government a chance to review the findings.

Bonnie Lysyk: I had met with the premier before the tabling. He was aware of the content of the report, so there was full disclosure there

Emma McIntosh: And then it was ready to go.

Bonnie Lysyk: I think we knew the public was waiting for the information and it was important to get the information out as soon as possible.

Emma McIntosh: Auditors tend to be pretty even keeled, so what you might not have inferred from Bonnie’s tone there is just how much that report went off. She might as well have dropped a bomb. She found that the government made the Greenbelt carve outs without considering environmental risks or how easy it would be to build houses on specific sites. She said Housing minister Steve Clark’s chief of staff Ryan Amato chose Greenbelt sites based on suggestions from developers who stood to gain $8 billion and she said Ford and Clark did not know how Amato picked the land. Here’s Colin D’Mello, the Queen’s Park Bureau chief for Global News.

Colin D’Mello: We found out that developers were given preferential treatment and insider access to influence the decision. Then we found out that they were giving them packages, USB keys. It was so much to comprehend to just sit there and think, my God, this policy wasn’t the governments, it was almost selected by the developers themselves. It was almost like they were saying these were the lands we would like removed, please. And the government said Yes.

Emma McIntosh: Queens Park was in the throes of an honest goodness political scandal. Things started to happen very, very fast. There was this weird press conference with Ford and Clark, the housing minister who was responsible for the Greenbelt. They took questions from reporters from two separate podiums, a few feet apart. Instead of sharing one, they said they weren’t contesting the auditor’s findings, but they were also quite clear that no one was resigning over this, not Clark, not even Ryan Amato, his chief of staff and the person who led the process according to the auditor’s report. And Ford just kept saying, the buck stops with me.

Premier Doug Ford: We run a $204 billion a year operation. I have trust in my ministers. I have trust in our caucus and I have trust in our staff. At the end of the day, I take full responsibility.

Emma McIntosh: Here’s Richard Southern from CityNews who was at the press conference that day.

Richard Southern: There was a lot of speculation, certainly in my mind that he’s just going to pack it in right now and maybe reverse everything right now. And he comes out and he doesn’t deny anything in the report. He kind of made this vague reference to we’ve made mistakes type of thing without mentioning the specific mistakes. I actually asked him that day, can you be specific about what you did wrong here? And he couldn’t answer that question. But sort of also in the same vein, pushing ahead with this agenda. So to me that was a very strange news conference and you kind of knew, hey, this is going to continue to dog him.

Emma McIntosh: The auditor’s report included 15 recommendations, stuff like “Don’t delete your emails,” “consult with indigenous communities before you do things on their territories.” That last one is important because one of the areas removed from the Greenbelt, the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve is part of a land claim process from Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Ford kept saying he accepted all 14 recommendations when there were actually 15. The one he kept leaving out was probably the most consequential it was to return the land to the Greenbelt, tear it all up and start over. If the government still wanted to take land out of the Greenbelt, it could try again with a transparent and fair process.

Bonnie Lysyk: It seemed a logical recommendation that if you’re not aware and you see now it’s a flawed process, we’d recommend you put it back in and then reassess. When they didn’t do that and they came out agreeing to the rest of the recommendations. But that one, I think my sense is as soon as the media heard that, it would take a different life, right?

Emma McIntosh: Around this time, The Toronto Star reported that some people in Ford’s inner circle wanted to fire Ryan Amato and give him severance, stop the bleeding on the scandal. But Ford had intervened to save Amato’s job. The staffer was laying low, he’d actually been in Italy on vacation when the audit came out.

Colin D’Mello: Over the course of those three weeks. The question is, okay, what happens next? We were all in the holding pattern. Is the government going to reverse the Greenbelt decision? Is the government going to fire somebody? And nothing happens. And you can see the temperature just continue to swell and continue to swell and continue to swell.

Emma McIntosh: The news cycle at this point was relentless. There started to be public protests every weekend. Progressive Conservative voters were calling into CBC shows saying they’d never vote Tory again. People started circulating online petitions for Ford to step down and then a massive surprise.

Colin D’Mello: We got this notice. Ryan Amato has resigned, and then I had to pivot because at that point it was like I had to go on air in like five minutes.

Emma McIntosh: Amato wrote a resignation letter that was leaked to several news outlets. I haven’t independently verified it, but it said he felt his role had been unfairly depicted. It also said, I am confident that I have acted appropriately and that a fair and complete investigation would reach the same conclusion. Later in response to another story, Amato sent me an email where he said he expects to provide a more fulsome response once I am fully exonerated of any impropriety. And then the morning after Amato resigned,

Clip 3: Major developments in the Greenbelt scandal here at Queen Park a day after the housing minister’s chief of staff resigns. The RCMP is now in charge of a potential criminal investigation into the Ford government’s handling of the Land swap.

Emma McIntosh: We haven’t talked about the police in a hot minute. If you remember, the Ontario Provincial Police had been trying to decide whether to launch an investigation we hadn’t heard in months. So the RCMP put out a statement confirming they’re investigating. Hang on, what they’re officially investigating?And then they put out a second statement saying, wait, nevermind. We’re also just doing a review, not investigating, not officially. There was barely time to digest that before even more happened.

Colin D’Mello: So on a Friday afternoon, the premier decides he’s going to hold a news conference. The premier comes out on the second floor of the Ontario legislature just outside of his office. Amassed are all of the Queens Park Press Gallery in a semicircle. We’re ready with our questions because we have a laundry list of them and the questions include things like, did you direct this process to open up the Greenbelt? Did you know what Ryan Amato was doing? How is it that your office had no knowledge of this? What are you going to do if the RCMP investigates? But for me, all of this boiled down to one question, is this not corruption? So I just started peppering him with the questions of corruption. People think that you government is corrupt. Explain to them why you don’t see this as corruption.

Premier Doug Ford: Well, I’m trying to build homes. That’s my intention. It’s none of that. I’m trying to help. Well, something that’s pretty nasty saying that, but at the end of the day, I have one reason. One reason I ran for Premier is to represent the people to represent…

Emma McIntosh: The whole thing was getting messier by the day. Some First Nations have been calling on Ford to return land to the Greenbelt for almost a year. But then a group representing the chiefs of all First Nations across the province said it too. The Star reported that one of the owners of former Greenbelt Land had put their property up for sale instead of preparing to build homes on it. Remember removing the Greenbelt designation immediately up the price of this land in a big way. The owners said they were foreign investors and they didn’t mean to sell it just to find a development partner. Premier Ford was not happy.

Colin D’Mello: Premier Doug Ford who said in a statement, at no point was the intention to sell, disclose to the government’s facilitator during active and ongoing discussions. Our government, he said, is exploring every option available, including immediately starting the process to put these lands back into the Greenbelt.

Emma McIntosh: And then the other shoe dropped. A second report, the one from the Integrity Commissioner. Speaker 12: The Greenbelt scandal just got a whole lot worse for the Ford government. The Integrity Commissioner has found that the Minister of Housing violated the Integrity Act with the Land Swap and some developers benefited as a result.

Emma McIntosh: If the auditor’s report was Greenbelt, the movie, the Integrity Commissioners, the director’s cut with all of the behind the scenes details. The Integrity Commissioner, whose name is J. David Wake, actually included quotes from his interviews with the people involved. A lot of them came to those interviews with lawyers in tow and the report had entire subplots we had no idea about, and here’s something no one expected. Wake also ruled that the housing minister Steve Clark, had breached ethics rules. The Minister did not oversee the Greenbelt changes and didn’t know how Amato chose the carve-outs, but Wake found that he should have. But by remaining ignorant, Clark had violated the duties of his office.

Colin D’Mello: That Integrity Commissioner’s report set off the second bomb. I mean, it’s one of those things where you so rarely in politics see twin explosives go off and the damage that that can create, right? It’s like if the government was in a crater now there in a 10 foot deep hole because this Integrity Commissioner’s report has pulled back even more layers.

Emma McIntosh: Before I walk you through the Commissioner’s report, I should warn you that this might get a little confusing. We can’t be certain about what happened since some of the witnesses gave conflicting accounts, but here we go. Our best understanding to date of what happened inside the Ford government leading up to the Greenbelt changes. It was Premier Doug Ford who gave the original instructions to his housing minister Steve Clark. The Premier did this in a letter outlining the minister’s mandate a set of instructions given to each member of cabinet at the beginning of a term. Doug Ford’s team had started sketching it out before the June, 2022 provincial election was even over. It said Clark should complete work to codify processes for swaps, expansions, contractions, and policy updates for the Greenbelt in fall 2022, the premier staff later told Wake that meant exploring the idea not delivering a full Greenbelt land swap in a matter of weeks. Clark and Amato told Wake, they read it differently. They told the commissioner that at first they didn’t think this was ever really going to happen. Clark talked to Ford and his chief of staff about it, but the Integrity Commissioner didn’t go into detail about what was said then came Amato. He’d been working in politics for a while, but this was his first time being a chief of staff. He was handpicked by the Premier’s office for the gig and his testimony to the Integrity Commissioner. He remembered a conversation that seems to have happened on September 15th, 2022. Amato alleged Ford was there. Clark too. The report said Amato asked Ford directly about the Greenbelt item In the letter. The words were something along the lines of quote, respectfully, sir, is this something that needs to be done or is this one of the things that we might not do? Amato didn’t remember who responded or what they said, but left that conversation with what the Commissioner described as a clear understanding that something needed to be done. Clark and Ford told Wake they had no memory of this conversation, but later that day, Amato texted his deputy a quick summary of it. Steve Clark hasn’t answered our request for an interview, so we can’t know for sure how he felt at this point, but he told the Integrity Commissioner, he wasn’t exactly thrilled about being asked to renege on his promise to not touch the Greenbelt am offered to take over. He told Clark to leave it with me and that ended Clark’s involvement until the proposal was done. The night before this alleged September 15th meeting, Amato had been at a building industry dinner. While he was there, developers, Silvio De Gasperis and Michael Rice approached him to ask about carving their properties out of the Greenbelt. De Gasperis also gave him a package of information about the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve. De Gasperis told the commissioner that site was the biggest disappointment of his career and he’d kept bringing it up with government officials because it really, really mattered to him. Amato didn’t say much, just that he’d take a look. A week later, Amato convened with two senior bureaucrats at his ministry, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. He told them the government was serious about removing land from the Greenbelt, but they had just over a month to come up with a plan and that he already had two sites in mind, the ones Rice and De Gasperis told him about. The commissioner described what happened next as chaotic and almost reckless. According to Wake, Amato led a small team of senior public servants. Developers made requests, sometimes preparing USB drives for Amato, who passed them to bureaucrats. He chose 14 of the 15 sites that were eventually removed from the Greenbelt. The 15th was suggested by public servants because it was part of a related lawsuit. Wake said Amato did all of this largely alone and undirected. Public servants are normally expected to keep their advice to government confidential, but in this case, the government took extra steps to make sure public servants wouldn’t reveal what they were working on to anyone. They all signed non-disclosure agreements, and they referred to the Greenbelt work with code words. Two of the ones we know about are Special Project and G Star. Amato also told Wake they tried to create a minimal paper trail which would explain why there’s still so much of this we don’t understand.

Colin D’Mello: Now we find out some even crazier stuff because of the fact that they’re speaking under oath and there’s a lot of very conflicting information, a lot of direction from the premier’s office denials that the premier’s office was involved and a lot of questionable information that’s still to this day has not quite been answered.

Emma McIntosh: Originally, Amato’s team had a set of criteria for picking the pieces of land they carve out. They were looking for lands close to the edges of the Greenbelt where there wasn’t significant farmland or sensitive environmental features where the land could be easily serviced and connected to infrastructure. The problem is a lot of the sites developers brought forward didn’t quite fit. A lot of it was actually prime farmland or had sensitive environmental features, so that criteria was quickly dropped. Four areas to be removed from the Greenbelt also weren’t on the edge of the protected area, so the team altered the boundaries to make it work. When ministry staff said they didn’t think they could figure out how to make sure any eventual homes had electricity or working toilets, at least not in a matter of weeks, the team dropped that requirement too. One public servant told Wake, quote, it was very hard to keep a handle on the consistency of the criteria because they weren’t very, what is the word I’m looking for? They weren’t very evidence-based. Wake also found Amato had led the public servants working on this to believe he was acting on behalf of the Premier’s office or in one case Doug Ford himself. Wake wrote that Amato succeeded in this deception. Finally, Amato brought the final plan to Steve Clark for approval. Clark revised one Greenbelt removal to protect more of a wetland. Otherwise witnesses said the minister signed off without asking questions about who owned the sites. Clark told Wake he thought they were picked by public servants. In any case, the plan went to Ford’s cabinet, which is when Ford saw the full plan for the first time. He and his ministers all signed off too, and a few days later it went public. As that turmoil played out inside the government, a developer rumour mill was buzzing. Ever since The Toronto Star team and I revealed which developers owned the open Greenbelt land, all of Ontario had been wondering, did anyone inside the government tip off developers about the Greenbelt removals? Wake wrote that he couldn’t prove that, but he could say that when Amato didn’t immediately say no to developers’ requests for Greenbelt carve outs, they realized something was up. And when Amato came back to them with follow-up questions, they realized the Greenbelt was in play. Words started to spread and Amato had some awareness that would happen. He told Wake the development community is a lot like high school. They all start talking to each other. Wake said Silvio De Gasperis told him that he told another developer about it, who ended up making Greenbelt carve out request for a piece of land the two companies were working on together. Amato granted that request, yet another developer found out over a round of golf. Other people couldn’t explain how they’d known to put in a Greenbelt removal request when they did. For example, Shakir Rhemattullah of FLATO Developments. We talked a little bit about him in the last episode. He went to the Ford family, stag and doe, a pre-wedding party for the previous daughter. Five weeks after that party, his lawyer reached out to the province to ask about removing one of FLATO’s properties. Wake questioned how the company happened to make this request right as the Greenbelt project was getting underway. Again, there are conflicting accounts. Rhemattullah said it was in the normal course of business to ask consultants to keep submitting requests. He also told Wake he didn’t talk to anyone in the provincial government about this. Wake wrote that he thought Rhemattullah’s explanation strains credulity. So how did Wake make sense of this? He wrote that someone probably did tip FLATO off, but he also said he found the suggestion that Ella got tipped off at the stag and doe do to be fanciful. In the end, he didn’t make a definitive finding. Here’s Noor Javed from The Toronto Star.

Noor Javed: Every time you looked at it, there was another really amazing detail. There were so many things in that report that took it beyond even our story, right At that point it was like its own beast.

Emma McIntosh: I want to talk about one more developer here. Sergio Mangia. As I said last episode, he bought a ticket to the stag and doe, but ultimately didn’t go. For years, Mangia has been telling various governments and officials that one of his properties doesn’t belong in the Greenbelt. That includes contact with the Ford government and allegedly Doug Ford himself. Like all of the developers mentioned in this show, I’ve asked Mangia for comment every time I’ve written about him, and like pretty much all of them, he didn’t answer until the final weeks before this podcast went to air. On a Friday afternoon. He wrote back and agreed to go for coffee to tell me his side of the story, but he didn’t want to be recorded. There are a lot of reasons why I was eager to hear what Mangia had to say. The Premier has repeatedly said he wasn’t involved in picking which parcels of land would be taken out of the Greenbelt. The auditor general affirmed that, but the story of Mane’s contact with the Ford government has raised questions for some people about whether the premier might’ve been more involved than we know. I’m just going to lay it all out for you. We’re not 100% sure how Mangia has land ended up being part of the Greenbelt Land swap. His company, which is called UrbanSolutions, has said it had no advanced knowledge of the Greenbelt changes. We do know from the Integrity Commissioner that Mangia and a colleague talked to Amato and his deputy about the property before the Greenbelt changes were announced in 2022. The company has said those conversations were just a continuation of its multi-year effort to correct what it sees as a Greenbelt mapping error. Some of Amato’s texts from that time as captured by the Integrity Commissioner suggest that Ford also talked to Mangia about it at some point. In one, Amato says quote the Premier needs to stop calling this guy. But is that actually what happened? We don’t know because Amato also told Wake that Mangia was the one who was calling Ford and not the other way around. Also, Mangia told the integrity Commissioner he hasn’t had any personal phone calls with the Premier, and then there’s a document that came out a bit later through Freedom of Information. The document is a 2021 letter from UrbanSolutions to the premier’s executive assistant at the time. The letter recounts a face-to-face. Discussion that year where UrbanSolutions said the Premier agreed to pursue removing manias land from the Greenbelt. This talk allegedly happened at a Progressive Conservative party fundraiser hosted by Mangia. One person who was allegedly present has denied going to any such meeting and it’s hard to parse what really happened, but to many people it appears to clash with what the Premier told the Integrity Commissioner. The Premier said he doesn’t know Sergio Mangia and doesn’t remember meeting him. I will say Doug Ford meets thousands of people every year, and it would be difficult to keep track of them all. When I talked to Mangia about this, he brought a big file folder of public documents to show me his view. This talk was mostly off the record, but he did tell me a few things I can share with you. Mania told me he’s not a land speculator. He said he’s not somebody who’s just buying up land and hoping to flip it once its value goes up. He’s in it to build things. He also told me about his track record, which includes affordable housing and higher density units. He said he respects the Greenbelt and its intent, but he thinks his land was included due to a mapping error. The land is right next to a neighborhood and a school and it does have access to municipal services and utilities. Mania said that although he did repeatedly ask to have his land taken out of the Greenbelt for many years, he’s as confused as the rest of us about how things ended up this way. He said he told the integrity commissioner the truth and that he didn’t do anything wrong. As for Ford, he gave a news conference shortly after the 2021 UrbanSolutions Letter came out. In it, he reiterated that he didn’t remember talking to Mangia. Reporters also asked him directly whether he lied to the Integrity Commissioner. Here is that exchange.

Clip 4: Did you lie to the integrity commissioner about that?

Premier Doug Ford: I have the utmost respect for the Integrity Commission and the job he does, and I’m always there to assist him any way I can and I’ll continue to assist him.

Emma McIntosh: Make of that what you will. We are almost at the end of all of the juicy stuff that came out of this report, but bear with me on a few more things. The report included tidbits about that Vegas trip we talked about last episode and the stag and doe. And it also included notes on other ethics violations by ministry staff like accepting a free lunch from a mystery man Wake named Mr. X. According to Wake’s report, Mr. X was allegedly acting as an unregistered lobbyist for a Greenbelt landowner. He reportedly signed a contract that could have netted him a total of nearly $1 million if he managed to get that Greenbelt land to be developable. Unregistered lobbying can be illegal and so can getting a payment for a certain outcome, and that’s why Wake named him Mr. X. The commissioner is bound by law, so deal with potential breaches of lobbying rules separately and he’s limited in what he can say publicly about those investigations. He also didn’t interview Mr. X for the report, but it was important for Wake to include what he learned about Mr. X because it raised bigger concerns about loopholes and Ontario’s lobbying rules. Even if he finds Mr X did something wrong, he can’t do much, legally speaking. Wake could ban him from being a registered lobbyist, but would that really deter someone who is allegedly doing it unregistered in the first place? And if you’re thinking, geez, that’s a lot. Yes, yes it is. Reading this report, it was honestly hard to imagine how the government could credibly push forward with Greenbelt development. The next day, August 31st, 2022, Ford did another press conference with reporters. It was inside a high school auto shop in Etobicoke, in Toronto’s West End, the area where Ford grew up and still lives, his home turf. The details of it still feel surreal. There was a Ford Escape parked in the shop and a poster hanging just out of the camera’s view read Power corrupts. I’m not kidding. The Premier was making some unrelated announcement and it got super uncomfortable when the questions started coming in and especially when Colin D’Mello stepped up to the mic,

Colin D’Mello: I’d asked him, it seems like from these two reports, it was nothing but incompetence from top to bottom, from the premier who directed his chief of staff to the housing minister who turned a blind eye to the chief of staff who decided that he was going to go rogue and do everything, according to these reports, do everything in his power to see out the Premier’s wishes. So I asked him, does the buck not stop with you? At what point do you take personal accountability? And the Premier did something that I never imagined he would do. -responsibility here, and how are people to have trust in your leadership?

Premier Doug Ford: Well, thank you for that, Colin, and I’m sure you just walked down the street from your home, that you have a home, but do you know how many people don’t have a home, Colin? There’s hundreds of thousands of people that home hold it. There’s hundreds of thousands of people that don’t have homes. When we have a housing crisis, I have two options, Colin. I sit back like the other government did and let the whole province fall apart or we move forward and we build homes because I know you, Colin, a year down the road, if we don’t have the homes, you’re the first person that’s going to be up here saying, why didn’t you build the homes? Why didn’t you do this? Why didn’t you do that? Well, Colin, guess what? We’re going to build homes. We’re going to build homes until people have the same opportunity that you have. You have a nice home down the street, but guess what? There’s hundreds of thousands of people that don’t have your opportunity, that don’t have the good paying job that you have. That’s the difference.

Emma McIntosh: I was in the room for this. Colin stormed out. The other reporters and I were completely gobsmacked. Did the premier just dox the president of the press gallery on live tv? Siobhan Morris from CTV summed it up well.

Siobhan Morris: I think to follow up on Colin’s question, I don’t think that people love the idea of you attacking reporters for where they live. I don’t have a home, and I think it’s the same thing. How can people have confidence in your government when we see gross in competence reported both by the Auditor General and by the Ethics Commissioner now about the way that this process was delivered, and you say the buck stops with you, and really there’s no change made on the part of the government that the public sees.

Colin D’Mello: In our world of being in the public eye, whether you are a government official or a reporter, there’s an unspoken unbroken cardinal rule. Don’t tell people where you live. 30 minutes later, there was another individual in the Premier’s office who called me and offered me an unequivocal apology on behalf of the Office of the Premier, which I accepted, but I think it went to show just how much pressure the Premier was under that he felt like the only way out of this was to lash out.

Emma McIntosh: Steve Clark did a press conference later that day. The temperature was lower, but it was intense in a completely different way. Clark is an experienced politician. He’d been doing it since he was 22 when he became mayor of his hometown. Until the Greenbelt scandal. He had no dark marks on his record. I’ve gone toe to toe with him many times over the last four years, and he was always one of my favorite ministers to interview because he knew his files and he would go to bat for them. But the person who stepped up to the podium that day, it seemed like an entirely different minister. Apologetic, sad, weary at times. He even looked emotional.

Steve Clark: I accept that Ottawa have had greater oversight over my former chief of staff and over the process and two Ontarians. I want to say very sincerely that I apologize that I did not.

Siobhan Morris: The only way it makes sense to people who know you is that if you thought this was being done because the premier wanted it, that his people were taking care of it. Is that how you saw it at the time?

Steve Clark: Yeah, it was. The process around the mandate and the decision around these properties was a big decision by the government. As I said to you all in November, it was a fundamental shift completely from our position and it’s under my watch. I’ve said to you yesterday, I said to you today that…

Emma McIntosh: He resigned a few days later on Labour Day.

Colin D’Mello: I think the anger from the public was largely building as they found out more and more and more, and it looked shadier and shadier as every day went by.

Emma McIntosh: Remember Charlie Pinkerton? He’s the reporter who broke the story about a few Ford government insiders going on that trip to Las Vegas at the same time as Shakir Rehmattullah, a developer who later had land removed from the Greenbelt. Well, Charlie followed that up with a story casting doubt on whether some of the people on that trip gave the Integrity Commissioner the right information about when they went, which is a big deal because that evidence is given under oath and giving false testimony could be considered perjury. Charlie was able to confirm the dates by calling the hotel, The Wynn Las Vegas, to find out when one particular person on the trip went to the hotel spa. Amin Massoudi, who at the time was working for Doug Ford,

Amin Massoudi: One of those who went on the trip, received a good luck ritual, a massage at the same time that the developer on the trip was there.

Emma McIntosh: Then CTV took a step further and reported that according to hotel employees, another attendee, MPP Khaleed Rasheed got the good luck ritual too. And guess who else got a massage at the same time? According to CTV sources, would be Greenbelt developer Shakir Rehmattullah, which was weird because they told the Integrity Commissioner, they just bumped into each other in Vegas and didn’t hang out or plan anything together. Although Rasheed and Rehmattullah do know each other. They’re longtime friends and Rashid’s wife actually works for Rehmattullah. One more person was also on this trip. Jay Truesdell. At the time he was working in the private sector, but by 2022 he worked for Doug Ford. He was the director of housing policy and he was involved in the Greenbelt changes. Truesdell was there in Vegas, but he did not get a massage. The Premier’s office initially denied that Truesdell and Rasheed gave the commissioner the wrong dates for the trip. Later though, Rasheed’s office said it did mix up the dates by mistake and had reached out to the Integrity Commissioner to correct the record. Truesdell and Massoudi didn’t answer questions about this from Charlie and CTV. Rehmattullah hasn’t answered questions either, but he didn’t get the date of the trip wrong.

Colin D’Mello: A lot of talk about massages at this time. That was kind of strange

Emma McIntosh: At this point, polls showed the Progressive Conservatives’ approval numbers in free fall. Meanwhile, retired Greenbelt planner, Victor Doyle and a bunch of his allies had been organizing, getting information out to reporters, getting people out to protests. A group sprang up called Greenbelt Guardians, a crew of dedicated Greenbelt lovers who were watching for any signs of development in the carved out zones. And in the midst of it all the Progressive Conservatives went to a caucus retreat in Niagara Falls and had a meeting. Colin’s sources told him it turned out to be a major turning point.

Colin D’Mello: Khaleed Rasheed, the minister who was accused of not telling the Integrity Commissioner the straight truth. He was in this caucus meeting. He gets a tap in the shoulder by someone from the premier’s office, tells him to leave the room, and he’s told that he’s no longer going to be a cabinet minister. As a result of what happened with the Integrity Commissioner.

Emma McIntosh: According to reporting from The Toronto Star, the caucus saw some polling in that meeting that showed the Premier and his party could lose their majority. It didn’t back down. Richard Southern’s sources also said this meeting was pretty bleak.

Richard Southern: I’ve heard from my caucus. He was in this caucus retreat with all his MPPs and it was pretty clear they all said to him, listen, premier, you got to throw the towel in on this. We’re just getting beaten bad. We’re hearing from our constituents.

Emma McIntosh: It was September 21st, 2023, the premier called a surprise press conference on the main strip in Niagara Falls.

Colin D’Mello: So September 21st, I decided to pick up another gallery member, Richard Southern, who works with CityNews and 680 News to drive from Toronto to Niagara Falls.

Richard Southern: And I guess the first thing that struck me was the location of this news conference. It was in a outdoor parking lot located right across the street from a Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville restaurant. In fact, you could hear the Jimmy Buffett tunes blaring as we were setting up for the news conference, Wasting Away Again in Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett: Wasting Away Again in Margaritaville.

Richard Southern: I remember the premier and his caucus crossing the street coming over to this parking lot and the premier taking to the mic. And what we heard, Emma, was one of the most, I guess, remarkable walk backs, one of the most remarkable mea culpas you’ll ever hear, certainly in Ontario politics, right?

Premier Doug Ford: I made a promise to you that I wouldn’t touch the Greenbelt. I broke that promise. And for that, I’m very, very sorry. I’ll be reversing the changes we made and won’t make any changes to the Greenbelt in the future. Because even if you do something for the right reasons with the best of intentions, it can still be wrong.

Emma McIntosh: I had heard this might be coming, but I think when it actually happened, I fully lost my mind. My recording of the press conference captured the moment

Premier Doug Ford: As a first step,

Emma McIntosh: oh my God,

Premier Doug Ford: reversing the changes…

Emma McIntosh: AH! In pretty short order, Ford confirmed that Jay Truesdell resigned too. It hadn’t even been a year since the government first announced the Greenbelt changes, but there we were, two ministers and two staffers down. The government’s credibility in tatters, no new housing to show for it, not even so much as a shovel in the ground and still so many unanswered questions about what the heck just happened. It was also a difficult day for developers who didn’t do anything illegal. They used their power and our political system really effectively to get an outcome that would’ve benefited them, had it stuck. And when all was said and done, it was also nearly a year of their time and work and money that just went down the drain. It was the politicians who took oaths to serve the public. It was the politicians who made the decisions. I reached out to Alana De Gasperis to see how that felt. She’s one of Silvio’s daughters and she usually handles questions from reporters. She declined to be interviewed here, but I want to read a little bit of what she wrote back to me. She said, we are still absorbing what is a huge setback after a tremendous amount of work done in good faith to plan for a community with significant public benefits. And yeah, that housing situation, it is still really bad.

Noor Javed: And if they said, you know what? We really need to build these houses. We’re going to open up this much Greenbelt and we’re going to build affordable housing. If they had a plan that would’ve showed that this would actually make a difference to people and there’s no other place we can build this, I think people would’ve bought it. But all people saw was that we’re just going to build more McMansions and it’s going to be only these developers getting rich.

Emma McIntosh: And even though Ford reversed his moves, I think it’s worth asking, could something like this happen again? It would probably be political suicide for Doug Ford to touch the Greenbelt ever again, but with something similar in a different government, Bonnie Lysyk audited Ontario governments for a decade and she thinks, yeah, probably.

Bonnie Lysyk: I’d like to think that these types of situations wouldn’t happen again. But these types of situations occur when governments become either complacent to make decisions they want to make quickly within their term and without the best factual information available to them. Also, I think sometimes stakeholders and lobbyists push for what they want and may convince governments that their ideas are in the best interests of government policy and the public, but maybe they’re not, and they have vested interest to their own stakeholders.

Emma McIntosh: On that point about lobbyists, I was actually hopeful for a while that at least something was going to change, that some long-term good might come from this for Ontario, because people resigning and people being mad at Doug Ford, that doesn’t make Ontario better. That doesn’t mean that we learned anything, but there are reforms that might help. And on that front, the Ford government announced in the fall that it would review Ontario’s lobbying rules, maybe look at jail time for people who break them. I’m feeling less hopeful now though because my friend Charlie Pinkerton at The Trillium has reported that the government is delaying the review. They gave no explanation or expected start date. Lobbyists told Charlie they thought the delay was another attempt to let the Greenbelt scandal fade in the rear view. One of them said there’s no political advantage to doing it. In December, 2023, Clark’s replacement, the new housing minister Paul Calandra, went before developers at another building industry event at the same venue where Ryan Amato first talked to Michael Rice and Silvio De Gasperis about Greenbelt carve-outs. The new minister delivered a heartfelt apology, and he didn’t exactly put a damper on concerns about the government’s coziness with developers. According to The Toronto Star, he said, I am sincerely sorry for the difficulties we have caused you in the industry over the last number of months. He specifically singled out Silvio De Gasperis saying, quote if Mr. De Gasperis is here, there he is. Let me just say this. I am particularly sorry for how you and many of you have been cast. Building homes, should not be something that you are ashamed of and we are going to support you and make sure that narrative changes. It’s not totally clear that the public actually cares though. As I record this, the next election is still two years away. Polls repeatedly show that a significant portion of Ontarians think Doug Ford is not acting in the public’s best interest, but he’d still win that election if it were held today.

Colin D’Mello: It’s all part of one big continuum of stories related to the ultimate question of who has influence over Premier Doug Ford, and how does he allow that influence to direct his government policy?

Emma McIntosh: And is that continuum of stories over?

Colin D’Mello: No, I can tell you that that question will never go away. The question is always going to be, is he doing it for me or is he doing it for someone else who has something to gain?

Emma McIntosh: There’s one more big reason that question remains. A few weeks after Ford reversed the Greenbelt changes, the RCMP came back into the picture. The Fords launched an official investigation. We don’t know exactly who is being investigated or what the alleged crime is. We don’t even know if anything will ever come of it, but we know it’s a shadow lingering behind everything that happens from here on out.

Noor Javed: It’s not over. Of course, it’s not over. The same government’s still in power and there’s still an RCMP investigation going on. This year, I feel like I am kind of tying up a lot of the loose ends of last year, but there’s still a highway that’s supposed to be built through the Greenbelt. There are still a lot of decisions being made locally at the local level that are affecting the Greenbelt. I’ve been getting calls like all the time saying, you got to come look at the situation. So I think it’s going back to the story that I did two years ago when I was talking about all the encroachment on the Greenbelt and all the Greenbelt broke, and I think those stories are still there because what we did is, yeah, we said we’re not going to build up these particular land areas, but in terms of protecting the Greenbelt, I don’t think the government has really gone that far to say we’re going to protect it.

Emma McIntosh: Even Victor, the architect of the original Greenbelt policy, doesn’t think that laws alone will protect the Greenbelt.

Victor Doyle: Governments can do whatever they want, but the key seems to be to raise awareness in the general population so that people value it and hopefully elect people who are committed to managing the region sustainably. And when it’s threatened, they stand up and push back like they did in these ones. So I think that’s where the best longevity can come from is when people and society buy into these things.

Emma McIntosh: Paydirt was a joint production of Frequency Podcast Network and The Narwhal. This episode was produced by me, Emma McIntosh and Joe Fish. Script edits by Stefanie Phillips from Frequency and Denise Balkissoon and Mike De Souza from The Narwhal. Sound design by Chris Clark. Stefanie Phillips is the showrunner of Frequency. Mary Jubran is the digital editor. Diana Keay is their business manager, and Jordan Heath-Rawlings is the executive producer. This episode also relied on reporting done by me for The Narwhal, Charlie Pinkerton for the Trillium, Jon Woodward at CTV and Robert Benzie, Noor Javed and Sheila Wang at The Toronto Star. The soundbites you heard in this episode came from CityNews, CTV and Global News. Special thanks to Connor Wooldridge. Thanks for listening. If you want to read any of my work or more coverage of environmental issues in Canada, check out the narwhal.ca.