Paydirt E1: It’s not easy being green

Jordan: For six years. Now, every day we’ve been bringing you one story that matters to Canadians. We usually tell that story in one 30 minute episode, but sometimes we find stories we wish we could spend more time on and reporters who can tell them better than anyone else. So today I’m proud to introduce the first episode of our next Big project. Welcome to TBS Presents. A few times a year we’ll take you inside a story with more voices, more depth, more sound, and more investigation. Your regular big Story episodes aren’t going anywhere. Some of them are just getting a little bigger like this one, which starts today and runs over the next three Mondays. We hope you like it. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, and this is Paydirt, the inside story of Ontario’s Greenbelt scandal. Emma McIntosh is an Ontario reporter with the Narwhal. She’s one of the reporters who broke this story wide open. She’s a frequent guest on this show and for the next three Mondays, she will be the voice that takes you inside this whole sorted affair. Welcome, Emma.

Emma McIntosh: Hi. Good to be here.

Jordan: It’s always good to have you here, and I’m going to ask you to start by trying to pinpoint the moment when this moved beyond ordinary political scandal territory and became something different, something deeper, something maybe even darker.

Emma McIntosh: Well, first of all, I just want to say that for me this was always something deeper, probably better than most people, how much the Greenbelt has been an obsession for me by the point that we’re dropping into the story. It had been for a year, but the exact moment that the Greenbelt started to matter to other people was August 9th, 2023. The day Ontario’s Auditor General released a very juicy report that made this whole thing just kick into another level.

Clip 1: The Greenbelt controversy exploding here at Queen’s Park today,

Clip 2: Ontario’s Auditor General says the process of opening up protected lands for housing development was heavily influenced by a small group of well-connected developers.

Jordan: That was the day that basically confirmed that we would eventually do this podcast. But to start, I’m going to ask you a question that I’ve asked you before on this show, but it’s important for people who live outside of Ontario or even people who may have kind of heard of the Greenbelt scandal but aren’t near to experience it firsthand. So quickly, maybe sum up for us, what is the Greenbelt?

Emma McIntosh: I’m so glad you asked. The Greenbelt is a giant ring of protected land that’s all around the greater Toronto area, mostly around the suburbs. And when I say giant, I actually mean that it is bigger than Prince Edward Island. It’s a bunch of farmland. There are forests in there, there’s good hiking trails. You’ve probably seen some of them on Instagram. It’s also home to a bunch of protected endangered species, and the really important thing to know about it is that it’s supposed to be off-limits to development forever.

Jordan: And yet what happened to start this scandal off?

Emma McIntosh: What happened is Doug Ford opened up 15 sections of the Greenbelt for development, 7,400 acres.

Clip 3: The Ford government has announced a new proposal to build 50,000 new homes on protected Greenbelt space.

Emma McIntosh: That was a big deal on its own. We didn’t know it yet, but he’d actually done it at the request of a bunch of well-connected developers who stood to make billions of dollars from the deal. And on August 9th, 2023, we found out all the sorted details that took this from a normal every day political scandal at Queen’s Park to a Hollywood level movie screenplay type of thing that we do not see around here very often,

Jordan: Which is where Emma, I turn this over to you. I can’t wait to hear the whole thing. Let’s roll it.

Emma McIntosh: The Ontario government first started working on the idea of a Greenbelt in the early two thousands. Back then, the premier was Dalton McGuinty, a Liberal. There was this idea that urban sprawl was out of control in the greater Toronto area. The region was growing really, really fast. There just wasn’t enough room to allow the suburbs to expand outward forever, at least not without causing serious environmental problems. So the government wanted to set something aside, put a check on development. Today, almost 20 years later, you can quite literally feel the landscape change as you get close to the Greenbelt’s edge.

Joe Fish: I’m actually, I’m getting excited.

Emma McIntosh: Oh, me too. I’m in the car with producer Joe Fish and we’re headed to a place some people call the crown jewel of the Greenbelt, the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve, east of Toronto. Along main roads entrances to this protected zone are marked with these huge blue iconic signs. There it is, entering the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve.

Joe Fish: That sign is in bad shape. Has it been shot at? What happened to that sign?

Emma McIntosh: Actually, it looks like it has holes in it.

Joe Fish: It looked really bad.

Emma McIntosh: Wow. Sign of the times I guess. It’s not easy being a Greenbelt. Not right now, but as we drive in, the suburbs fall away. Suddenly we’re just surrounded by rolling hills stands of trees and open fields.

Joe Fish: It’s nice. It really does feel like we’re in the country now.

Emma McIntosh: We’re here to walk along West Duffins Creek, a trail marking the edge of the Greenbelt. Our guide is someone who knows this place and the Greenbelt better than pretty much anyone.

Victor Doyle: Emma, where are you?

Emma McIntosh: Hi, it’s nice to see you, so sorry to keep you waiting. This is Victor Doyle. He’s retired now, but in the two thousands he was the lead land use planner on the provincial plan that became the Greenbelt.

Victor Doyle: It’s a beautiful river. It’s the cleanest river in the greater Toronto area because there hasn’t been much urban sprawl in this watershed

Emma McIntosh: Nowadays, we tend to think of conservation as a bread and butter issue for Liberals and New Democrats. But in 2003, when Victor started working on the Greenbelt, it had actually been a priority for Conservatives in Ontario. Two progressive conservative premiers, Bill Davis and Mike Harris, protected two rocky ridges that would eventually form the spine of the Greenbelt, the Niagara Escarpment and the Oak Ridges Moraine.

Victor Doyle: The Liberals wanted to have their own green stamp and legitimately build on that because the impacts of urban sprawl on the greater Toronto area, which goes from Hamilton to Oshawa up to Newmarket, have been very dramatic. We’ve lost 40% of our farmland in central Ontario and fully 50% of all the class one soils in all of Canada you can see from the top of the CN tower. So this is the best of the best farmland and it’s critical from an economic standpoint, from a water perspective, the conservation authorities have showed all our rivers and streams are degrading on the nature side, our forest and wetlands, we’ve lost many of our wooded areas or they get nibbled away. We’ve lost 72% of our wetlands, all primarily from urban sprawl and major infrastructure like roads to enable that to occur.

Emma McIntosh: So Victor and his team got to work. They had to look at farmland, geology, rivers planned for how much housing the region would need and make sure there was enough set aside for cities to build on for the next 75 years, but they couldn’t allow too much development. That’s important because green spaces absorb rainwater and snow melts. Imagine pouring a glass of water onto a lawn. The water just soaks in, right? But if you pour the water onto pavement, it pools. The same thing happens on a macro scale. If you pave over too much of an area, the water has nowhere to go. Suddenly your city might start having problems with flooding and in a lot of places around Toronto, there’s already too much pavement. Anyway, Victor and the team worked for two years to hash it out. They worked with a ton of people, farmers, conservationists, scientists, even developers. Dalton McGuinty unveiled the final plan in 2005, it added onto and connected the Niagara Escarpment and the Oak Ridges Moraine with hundreds of thousands of acres of forests and farmland and more

Clip 4: Clean drinking water snaking through a giant chunk of land dotted with life. Welcome to the Greenbelt. Protected land meant to stop urban sprawl in its tracks.

Emma McIntosh: For the most part, that land was privately owned and would stay that way, but putting it in the Greenbelt meant the owners wouldn’t be able to build much of anything on it. Not everyone liked the sound of that. After all, property you can’t build on is worth a lot less than property that’s developable. The day McGuinty announced the final Greenbelt boundaries, protestors showed up

Clip 4: Outside the Premier’s press conference. Angry farmers, the Greenbelt cuts through their properties. Suddenly their land is worth a lot less. They can’t sell it to developers and they will get no government compensation.

Emma McIntosh: Some of them actually wore chipmunk suits.

Clip 5: They’re taking away our property rights, they’re taking away our land.

Emma McIntosh: It wasn’t just farmers who were mad, some developers were too for a long time. Developers as speculated on agricultural land outside of cities,

Victor Doyle: Development interests by farms in the hopes that they’re going to be approved for urbanization because urban land is worth 20 to 30 to 40 times the value of farmland. The development industry has been purchasing land. It’s time immemorial basically. Certainly post World War II in hopes of building communities, and you see that all around and the growth of the region were now almost 10 million people, most of which were accommodated on land that used to be farmland and was purchased by development interests.

Emma McIntosh: You can become a millionaire that way, but if the government puts that land in the Greenbelt, there is no future building boom on it, no big payout. So when some developers land ended up in the Greenbelt, they opposed it pretty hard. Some even took the government to court, which did not work. Victor wasn’t very sympathetic.

Victor Doyle: My view is too bad, so sad. It’s just like speculating in the stock market.

Emma McIntosh: There were a lot of other complaints about the Greenbelt and how it would work. Developers and some local mayors also claimed it would cause a shortage of available land and drive up housing prices. We’ll talk more about that later. The progressive conservatives thought the whole thing was badly designed. New Democrats thought it had too many loopholes. In the end, the Greenbelt went ahead anyway. McGuinty told reporters it would stay intact forever.

Dalton McGuinty: This will not shrink is because the people of Ontario will jealously guard their Greenbelt

Emma McIntosh: And in the years since then, it kind of seemed like he was right. Despite pressure to open up the Greenbelt for development, the liberals stayed firm. They amended some mistakes in the original boundaries in 2017, taking out just under 400 acres of land, but they also expanded it to include an extra 25,000 acres. For the most part though, people in Ontario ended up being pretty happy with it. The farms and tourism opportunities in the Greenbelt generate 9.6 billion every year. The area is stewarded by this provincially funded charity called the Greenbelt Foundation. They commission polls regularly and they find that public support for the Greenbelt rarely dips below 90%, 90. For perspective, the legalization of cannabis in Canada is generally considered a popular success, and as of 2023, that policy had just 64% public support, but of course, 90 is not 100 and not everybody was or is happy. Whenever I’d write about the Greenbelt, I’d hear from people who still oppose the idea, still wanted their land out. I’d also hear whispers of developers holding onto their Greenbelt lands for decades, waiting for the day the policy would be undone and the development pressure was still there. Mostly it played out at local councils where municipal politicians decided what could be built where, and a reporter from the Toronto Star was keeping a close eye on things.

Noor Javed: I am Noor Javed. I am a journalist with the Toronto Star and I cover the 9 0 5 or suburban municipal politics.

Emma McIntosh: The 9 0 5 is a nickname for the bedroom communities around Toronto, which comes from their area code. So basically the place where the Greenbelt and the suburbs collide, no lives there. Full disclosure, she’s also a friend. We’ve worked on a few stories about the Greenbelt together.

Noor Javed: So much of the 9 0 5 beat is about development, right? Because that’s the part of the GTA that still has land to be developed, and so over the course of the last 10 years, I realized that so many of the decisions that were being made in council are by politicians. They weren’t, as much as we’d like to think that they were going through a democratic process, which they were, are also influenced by someone. So whether it is the local community group or a developer, a lot of the decisions are influenced by I guess who has the ear of council. Sometimes I’d be sitting in a council meeting watching a developer text the councillor, and then a decision would be made. And the 9 0 5, it’s actually very overt. People just say it. It’s not even really hidden.

Emma McIntosh: Victor could sense those same forces at play too. He saw a quiet undercurrent of backlash to the Greenbelt and another anti sprawl policy called the growth plan. He worried that backlash might be gaining traction. Was there ever a moment between 2005 and 2022 where you felt worried that the Greenbelt might not be kept around forever?

Victor Doyle: So at a certain level, no, but at another level, yes, and so not long after the Greenbelt and Growth Plan, which were 2005 and 2006 came into being, I’d say within five years the development industry had started its campaign to claim both plans had restricted the supply of land and that this was causing hardship to the ability to develop and accommodate population growth. None of it was true. My first sort of paper, which my team was working on at the ministry, and we were briefing senior officials about this was in 2012.

Emma McIntosh: What was that paper?

Victor Doyle: We were compiling this information, demonstrating this rhetoric and combating it with factual evidence to refute it and sharing it with our superiors to say, look, you need to be aware of what’s going on out there. There is a active campaign to undermine everything we’ve been working on

Emma McIntosh: And how did that report go over?

Victor Doyle: Deaf ears, essentially.

Emma McIntosh: Victor retired, but that push and pull kept going. Fast forward to 2018 and it reached the ears of Doug Ford. Doug Ford used to be a Toronto City counselor. His late brother, Rob Ford was the mayor. The Big Story made a whole series called The Gravy Train, diving into their unique style of populism and what happened there. So go listen to that. But Doug Ford was now back in politics as the leader of the Provincial Progressive Conservatives. He was all set to cruise to an easy victory and become Premier. McGuinty was gone and his successor, Kathleen Wynne was looking pretty weak in the polls. Then the Liberals leaked this video, someone we don’t know who filmed it at some kind of event a few months earlier. It’s grainy, but it’s pretty clear what it is. It’s Ford in a room surrounded by guys in suits.

Doug Ford: We will open up the Greenbelt, not all of it. We’re going to open a big chunk of it up and we’re going to start building and making it more affordable and putting more houses out there. The demand for single dwelling homes is huge, but no one can afford ’em, so we need to start building affordable housing. I’ve already talked to some of the biggest developers in this country, and again, I wish I could say it’s my idea, but it was their idea as well, give us property, we’ll build and we’ll drive the cost down. That’s my plan for affordable housing.

Emma McIntosh: The premier in waiting, making a promise behind closed doors to cut into a protected area that did not go over well with pretty much everyone.

Clip 5: Critics of Ford’s original plan had called it quote- idiotic

Clip 6: Ford brought heavy reaction from many on social media. Ford is unpredictable and I fear what will happen with him in charge is a worse option. Sounds like another Trump wannabe. What he says in private is what he really thinks, so kiss the Greenbelt goodbye. If Doug is elected,

Emma McIntosh: Like I said, the Greenbelt’s pretty popular, so within a matter of days, Ford’s campaign hosted a second video.

Doug Ford: Unequivocally, we won’t touch the greenbelt, unlike other governments that don’t listen. People, I’ve heard it loud and clear, people don’t want me touching the Greenbelt. We won’t touch the Greenbelt. We’ll figure out how to clean up this housing mess and this housing crisis that we’re facing in a different fashion. But all my friends, I listen to you. You don’t want me touching the Greenbelt. We won’t touch the Greenbelt.

Emma McIntosh: That put the media circus to rest. The Progressive Conservatives won the election.

Doug Ford: Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I will never forget the trust you put in me.

Emma McIntosh: Ford nearly went back on his promise in 2019 with a bill that could have allowed some Greenbelt development in a roundabout way, but people got mad at that too, so he backed down. Again,

Doug Ford: I’m not doing that. I’m not touching the Greenbelt.

Emma McIntosh: After that, I really thought the whole thing was settled. We’re keeping the Greenbelt intact. Instead, the government chipped away at the environmental protections in and around it, changing laws, fast tracking developments. There began to be this narrative for its opponents would throw around a lot. The premier is buddies with developers. There’s also a loophole in the Greenbelt law that allows the province to build highways through it. The Ford conservatives proposed two. Noor and I actually investigated one of them together. Highway 413. We found that a bunch of developers with connections to Ford own land along the proposed route the highway would make their land values skyrocket. The headline on that story was friends with benefits, but through 2020 and 2021, the government was also talking a lot about plans to make the Greenbelt even bigger and the guy responsible for it at the time, municipal affairs minister Steve Clark, kept repeating a promise to protect it.

Noor Javed: I had written several stories about how the Greenbelt was kind of being picked at and how it was falling apart. There was encroachment from development. The province wasn’t stepping in to protect it, and so there was a pattern that I had been writing about for the last year or two before this happened, but every time I’d go to the government, they would say, no, we’re not going to touch the Greenbelt. In fact, we’re expanding it.

Emma McIntosh: I filed a bunch of freedom of information requests for government documents from this time and this expansion plan was for real. It mostly included land that was already protected from major development, so it wasn’t that ambitious, but the ministry put in a lot of work on it. It was happening. They were really close to announcing it as 2021 came to an end. Then something shifted. They never announced it. They stopped talking about the Greenbelt altogether. An election happened in spring 2022 Ford’s, conservatives sailed to an easy victory. Again, the Greenbelt just didn’t come up, but they talked about building homes a lot.

Doug Ford: I promised to build this province to say yes to more housing, yes, to attainable housing, so families once again can strive for the dream of home ownership.

Emma McIntosh: That rhetoric about housing made sense. Ontario is in housing crisis. It has been for a while. That year it really felt like it took a turn for the worse. I moved in 2022 and let me tell you, it was ugly out there. Rents sky high, like over $2,000 a month for a tiny one bedroom. If you’re lucky and you want to buy? Good luck finding a house within two hours of Toronto that costs less than a million dollars. Summer turned to fall, the Progressive Conservatives started ramping up the housing talk. They introduced this law, Bill 23 that watered down a whole bunch of environmental protections.

Doug Ford: Our plan will cut more of the red tape and slows progress. It will make it easier to build the right type of housing in the right places…

Emma McIntosh: In retrospect, it seems obvious what was about to happen.

Noor Javed: I did this one story talking about how the Greenbelt was broken.

Emma McIntosh: Was that the one where the headline was the end of the Greenbelt question mark?

Noor Javed: Yeah, something like that.

Emma McIntosh: In spite of all of that, neither of us thought Ford would actually cut up the Greenbelt. That would be crazy.

Noor Javed: That would be like political suicide,

Emma McIntosh: But then came another one of those days. I’ll remember forever, November 4th, 2022. It was a Friday. I was working at the narwhals office inside a heritage building in downtown Toronto plugging away on some other scoop I was chasing. I had been calling sources all day to confirm this tip, and when one of them called me back, they said something like, oh, by the way, we heard a rumor Doug Ford is opening the Greenbelt like today. It’s probably nothing, just a fake rumor. The premier’s office is spreading to flush out leakers. Yeah, right. No way. Then someone else called my colleague Fatima Syed and said the same thing. We realized, whoa, okay, this is really happening In journalism and politics, there’s this thing called a Friday news dump. That’s when a government releases some unflattering news on a Friday afternoon when most reporters and their audiences are logging off for the weekend. The idea is that it’ll get minimal news coverage and hopefully minimal public attention. As Friday news dumps go, this one was pretty textbook. A Toronto Sun reporter named Brian Lilley was the one to break the news late that afternoon. The government quietly posted bulletins about it online in short order, but this was too big to get buried, and the news went crazy.

Clip 7: The province is proposing to remove 15 areas of land totaling approximately 7,400 acres from the edge of the Greenbelt. They say they’ll find 9,400 acres in other areas in return.

Clip 3: The Ford government has announced a new proposal to build 50,000 new homes of protected Greenbelt space after promising not to touch that land.

Emma McIntosh: Just weird, the 15 parcels of land the government chose just seemed random, a bunch of small pieces in a bunch of odd places, and the criteria they said they’d used also didn’t really make sense and 50,000 homes. The government had said it needed 1.5 million homes to solve the housing crisis. This was a drop in the bucket. Why upend the Greenbelt in such odd locations for just over 3% of the housing target? I was baffled. The government also said it was adding in 9,400 acres of land elsewhere to make up for the loss, but all of it came from that expansion plan the government shelved months ago. I knew it wasn’t going to be developed anyway, so not an equal swap. When Noor and I worked on that investigation about Highway 413, we spent a lot of time looking at public property ownership records, trying to figure out who was benefiting from the government’s decisions. I started to wonder if we should do the same thing here. Maybe that would help us figure out why this was happening. North of the city, Noor was thinking pretty much the same thing.

Noor Javed: I think the biggest thing was that the criteria that they had put out for why this land was selected was full of holes. It just did not make sense based on the criteria and the one thing that I remember that stood out to me was when they said the land that’s being removed is close to other developable land. I just remember looking at that and I was like, have these people driven around the 905 because literally anything in the Greenbelt is next to developable land. Where I live in the suburbs, there is a lot of development next to the Greenbelt, and so I just remember reading that and I was like, if that’s the case, then tens of thousands of acres would be removed from the Greenbelt, so that just stood out to me always as like, okay, there’s got to be specific people who are benefiting

Emma McIntosh: Sometime around 7:00 PM As I scrolled through the maps of the carve outs, something popped out at me. The biggest parcel, it was the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve. When we were looking into the 413, I had read up on the history of it, one of the developers who owns land near the proposed highway owned a big chunk of the preserve too. Silvio De Gasperis of TACC Developments. Remember when I said some developers had sued the government back in the 2000s over the Greenbelt? De Gasperis was one of them. He actually took them to court over this very same land. Sylvio De Gasperis is a huge name in the development industry. I’ve never met him and he didn’t want to be interviewed for this series, but his influence looms large. He’s built so much that he quite literally shaped a lot of the greater Toronto area. The 413 story, Noor found out that Sylvio’s younger brother, Michael, hosted Ford and one of his MPPs at a Florida Panthers NHL game. They watched from a private luxury suite. The company has benefited from some other Ford government policies too, like a special land zoning power. The province is used pretty regularly to make tax development projects move faster.

Noor Javed: We realized that it wasn’t so simple, that there was little cutouts and some parts were owned, but one person and some parts were owned by another person and the maps weren’t actually, they didn’t seem so accurate, and I remember just the amount of digging and the amount of trying to understand which parcels were owned by who and then trying to see if we could find any patterns.

Emma McIntosh: There were layers to it. Property ownership records in Ontario are public, but a lot of the time developers create different holding companies with different names for different pieces of land, so we had to pull corporate ownership records to find out who was behind them. Then we wanted to understand the landowner’s ties, the Ford government to see if that could be a factor and how they were chosen, so we looked at their political donation records and whether they hired lobbyists to talk to the government on their behalf. Those things don’t explain an entire relationship, but they’re a snapshot. We didn’t have a ton of time to figure it out. In Ontario, there’s a law called the Environmental Bill of Rights. It requires the government to consult the public for 30 days before changing environmental rules. That means we had exactly 30 days until the greenbelt grab became law, but really we probably only had half of that if we wanted whatever we found to actually be useful.

Noor Javed: It was interesting as we started to do this, all the patterns that started to emerge, and I guess the one that we ended up going with in the story was the dates that these parcels of land had been purchased by specific people.

Emma McIntosh: Number one, we found a handful of developers owned a lot of these Green bell parcels. A lot of them were familiar names from our previous investigations. People with ties to the government long donation records, well connected lobbyists or some mix of those things. Number two, developers had bought land in more than half of the parcels since 2018. The year Doug Ford first said he’d opened up the Greenbelt, then took it back and then became Premier.

Noor Javed: This government had been so adamant- publicly that it was not going to remove land from the Greenbelt, and so once we saw that people had bought it while Doug Ford was premier, it made us wonder why would if somebody bought this land, if they didn’t think it was going to be removed from the Greenbelt, why would they have bought it if they didn’t think they could develop on it? There was one sale in particular that caught our attention, and then became such a focal point of this investigation, which was a purchase that was made by developer Michael Rice. They purchased 700 acres of Greenbelt land in King City for $80 million, but the thing is they bought it in September,

Emma McIntosh: Just six weeks before the Greenbelt changes.

Noor Javed: I think it raised a lot of questions for us and everybody else too, as to what did he know? Did he know that the Greenbelt was going to be opened up? Did somebody tip him off?

Emma McIntosh: Actually, we found out later that Michael Rice did just get lucky. The government didn’t tip him off. He bought the land and approached the government about it right around the time they were considering Greenbelt carve-outs, but looking into his land led us to bigger questions about how these properties were selected. 13 days after the Greenbelt changes were announced, we were ready to publish.

Noor Javed: They knew that we had a really good investigation and we had worked really hard on it and that if it did nothing at all, it would get people talking and asking questions

Emma McIntosh: Talk and ask questions they did, especially at the Ontario legislature, also known as Queen’s Park. I want to stop us right here because we’ve talked a little bit about Ontario’s housing crisis, but I think we need to dive in a little deeper since according to Ford that housing crisis was the whole reason he did any of this. What’s actually causing that?

Ossie Airwele: That is a seemingly complex question, but it really boils down to some basic facts. Supply and demand ultimately

Emma McIntosh: Demand. This is Ossie Airewele, a senior associate at BDP Quadrangle.

Ossie Airwele: We are architects, urbanists, master planners, and in 2015 we’d seen a fairly sharp rise in the population of Toronto and then with that a steady decline in the availability of housing, whether that might be rental or homes to buy, and that as a combination has clearly resulted in the scenario where house prices have escalated and the trend obviously needs to be bucked by providing more homes.

Emma McIntosh: Does the Greenbelt play a role in that?

Ossie Airwele: It really doesn’t play a role in that.

Emma McIntosh: You might assume the opposite, but if we have a housing crisis and a bunch of undeveloped land, it probably makes sense to just build in that free space that maybe making a bunch of land off limits constraints how much room we have for houses. Plenty of people think so like developers, some local politicians, even some urban planners and academics. Most experts and officials I talk to though, say we actually have more than enough non-Greenbelt land available nine months before the Greenbelt changes. A panel handpicked by the Ford government came to the same conclusion. The Greenbelt is not driving up housing costs. We have plenty of land to fix this problem if we go about it in the right way. Remember Victor said his team set aside enough to 75 years of population growth. It hasn’t even been 20. Chief planners in the biggest regions where Greenbelt land was removed have said the same thing. There are a bunch of reasons why Ontario doesn’t have enough housing. We could probably make a whole podcast just explaining that, digging into stuff like outdated zoning rules and the inefficient ways, cities here use space, but the Greenbelt isn’t one of them, and according to Ossie and a lot of other experts, building in other places could actually be faster and easier. Because the Greenbelt has been protected for almost 20 years. Most of the land there doesn’t have water or sewage or electricity connections, all the stuff you need to actually build a neighborhood.

Ossie Airwele: There’s been a lot of suggestions that building in the Greenbelt is the thing to do, but when you do that, what you’re essentially doing is starting completely afresh and anew with infrastructure, whether that be roads with community facilities and assets, whether that be new schools, new green spaces, new places for healthcare and so on, whereas within our existing fabric, within the existing area of the GTA and other neighborhoods, we have a lot of those assets already and they’re readily available to scale up as density increases as well. It’s much cheaper, much more economical to do, and it’s sustainable both socially and economically, so it makes complete and environmentally it makes complete sense to focus on areas where we have the opportunity to increase density within existing areas and starting afresh.

Emma McIntosh: That’s so interesting. I feel like when people think about the housing crisis and think about ways to build stuff fast, they see a big open green space and they’re like, easy. We’ll just put some stuff down here, but what you’re saying is actually kind of the opposite, that the lack of stuff makes it harder to build.

Ossie Airwele: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you are starting from scratch, then you need to connect this new place to an existing place. I would imagine that if even if it was reasonable, and it’s not, to build in the Greenbelt, you still have to connect it to existing infrastructure and that costs money. It takes time. It’s unsustainable and it’s really just not a good model for the way future cities should grow and develop.

Emma McIntosh: But despite the broken logic and the public backlash sparked by our story, the government seemed determined to push the changes through. After reading government documents that have since been made public. We now know a little bit about what went on during this period. Inside the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, there’s a set of handwritten notes taken by a senior bureaucrat the day our investigation was published. They show that Ryan Amato, the chief of staff, the housing minister Steve Clark, called our story a hit piece. According to the notes, he also told his team to keep their mouths shut and stick to it. That’s a quote In the final hours of the legislatures fall sitting before all of the MPPS went home for Christmas, the government passed the bill. The opposition parties were still making a ruckus about it, calling for two independent provincial watchdogs to look into the Greenbelt changes, but as we rung in the new year, the news cycle was starting to move on. The government wouldn’t rule out more Greenbelt removals. Privately, my sources were worried it was setting a bad precedent. What’s stopping the government from removing protections from more sensitive land, even if they try to offset it by protecting different lands somewhere else? Nature doesn’t really work like that. The boundaries of the Greenbelt were chosen for a reason because experts thought this land was worth preserving. Was this the beginning of the end of the Greenbelt?

Noor Javed: The people I was speaking to, whether it was environmental groups or planners or even politicians were like, we don’t know what to do. Everybody seemed to be at their wit’s end, right? Like this is years of work, decades of work and everything got reversed,

Emma McIntosh: But then in early January, Global News reported that the Ontario Provincial Police were reviewing the Greenbelt changes. They were thinking about launching an investigation, and remember when I said the opposition parties were calling for two independent watchdogs to look into it. One was the auditor general who as you might guess from the name audits the government’s finances and decision-making. The other was the Integrity Commissioner who reviews whether MPPs and staffers are following ethics rules. Both of them have powers to compel people to turn over documents and answer questions, and on the same day, in mid-January, within a couple of hours of each other, they dropped mini bombshells. Both of them were launching investigations. Both of them are constantly investigating tons of things all the time, but for both of them to be looking into the same thing at the same time, that pretty much never happens. Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles broke the news of the Auditor General’s investigation live at a press conference.

Marit Stiles: Some things smells fishy here, and Ontarians deserve answers. The government’s change of heart is going to benefit and make a lot of money for very few people.

Emma McIntosh: It was so nuts because all of this meant that eventually we would know the truth or at least more of it. The only question was who would get to it first? Journalists, the Auditor General, the Integrity Commissioner or the police?Coming up on Paydirt, the Ford government’s relationships with developers are suddenly under a microscope. Journalists and investigators are digging, and what they find raises even more questions.

Clip 8: Is the government going to reverse the Greenbelt decision? Is the government going to fire somebody?

Clip 9: I remember calling my desk and saying, we got to go live as soon as she speaks. This is big.

Clip 1: The Greenbelt controversy exploding here at Queen’s Park.

Clip 8: For me, all of this boiled down to one question. Is this not corruption?

Doug Ford: Holy Christ, I just swallowed a bee.

Emma McIntosh: Episode two of Paydirt will air right here on The Big Story next Monday. Paydirt is 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 Ryan Clarke. 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. The show also relied on reporting done by me for The Narwhal and Noor Javed and Brendan Kennedy for the Toronto Star. The news clips you heard in this episode came from City News, CBC, CTV and Global News. You also heard a clip from the Ontario Liberal Party and one from the Toronto Region Board of Trade. Special thanks to Doug Richardson. See you next week.