Globe Editorial: Disturbing questions about Doug Ford’s move to Greenbelt | Daily News Byte

The Ontario government’s sudden and poorly explained decision this month to open up protected land in the province’s Greenbelt for housing development is deeply troubling.

It is impossible for a reasonable person not to feel uneasy about this. It is also possible for the Ford government to provide transparency on the issue, and show that its decision was justified, putting the matter to rest. The real problem is that it hasn’t been done and doesn’t seem imminent.

What the public knows at this point is the following:

Premier Doug Ford promised during his 2018 leadership campaign to carve out “a big chunk” of the Greenbelt for development. The Greenbelt was created in 2005 to protect the headwaters of the rivers that flow into Lake Ontario, to preserve valuable farmland and to connect the forest and wetland ecosystems that run in an arc across the top regions of Greater Toronto and Niagara. It covers about 2 million hectares.

The ensuing political and public backlash forced Mr. Ford in full retreat. He promised in the 2018 provincial election campaign that he would never touch the Greenbelt. In a numberhe and his Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister, Steve Clark, repeated that promise 18 times from 2018 to 2021.

The Ford government’s insistence that it will never open the Greenbelt to development has somehow not stopped land speculation within its boundaries. An investigation by The Globe and Mail found that at least nine properties on land carved out of the Greenbelt were sold for a total of more than $300-million after Mr. Ford in 2018.

One of them is a piece of land in the Greenbelt that was sold for $80-million in September, a few weeks before the government unveiled its new plan.

An investigation by The Globe, and another conducted jointly by The Toronto Star and The Narwhal, also found that at least four developers bought properties that the Ford government wants to remove from the Greenbelt tomorrow- palad has been donating to PC Party since 2018.

The Ford government insisted that the parcels of land in question were selected based on strict criteria: having the potential for houses to be built in the near future; adjacency to existing Greenbelt boundaries and urban areas; and on or near serviceable land. But it has so far refused to say how many pieces of land fit the declared criteria, and why it chose the properties it did.

Both governments have insisted that reneging on their promise not to develop on the Greenbelt was forced upon it by the province’s housing crisis. But this is contradicted by a report from the Ontario Housing Affordability Task Force, a government expert panel that concluded in February that “a land shortage is not the cause of the problem.”

It is all the more worrying that, according to the government, the Greenbelt carve-outs will only produce 50,000 new homes. The Ford government’s overall goal was to build 1.5 million homes over 10 years; in other words, it could build 1.45 million homes – within an acceptable margin of error – without profitable Greenbelt speculation.

And it doesn’t have any certainty when the Ford government says that, if houses are not built in the carve-outs by 2025, the land will be returned to the Greenbelt. That is as believable as the promise of Mr. Ford will not attack the Greenbelt for the first time. Any sane person knows that the land will be lost forever.

Perhaps most troubling of all, Mr. Clark was asked three times Tuesday in the Ontario legislature whether he or anyone in his government tipped off developers about the Greenbelt plan, and three times he failed to say he hadn’t. But asked the same question the next day in the same place, he changed his answer to a hard no.

Ontario’s integrity commissioner is now reviewing a request from the Opposition to investigate possible ethics violations. And the NDP called on the province’s Auditor-General to review the Greenbelt plan for “conflicts of interest and insider information sharing,” and to “refer any evidence of misconduct to the appropriate authorities. “

Those are welcome developments. Everyone agrees that Ontario needs to build more homes, and do it fast. But few would argue that it justifies the way the Ford government plans to open up the Greenbelt. The smell emanating from it was too strong to ignore.