Keeping Up The Pressure

Fires are burning in the House of Ford (not the fashion mogul's, but rather the corrupt and incompetent one that 'rules' our province). That increasing attention is being paid to the sometimes smoldering, sometimes white-hot combustions is attributable to citizen awareness, ceaseless probing by NDP leader Marit Stiles and her MPPs, media investigations, and the absolute arrogance of the now badly-wounded Ford cabal.

People feel rightfully emboldened now that the premier has promised to correct his Greenbelt 'mistake' by restoring the stolen lands. Ford, however, is sadly mistaken if he thinks that is the end of this very visible evidence of his corruption.

There are, for example, the pesky questions surrounding the provincial fiats declaring urban expansions in both Ottawa and Hamilton.

On the same Friday afternoon last November that Premier Doug Ford's government announced its plan to take certain developers' land out of the Greenbelt, it also made moves that benefited developers who own rural land on the outskirts of Ottawa and Hamilton. 

It did so by expanding each city's boundaries, instantly turning certain parcels of agricultural land from rural to urban, opening them up to future housing development and sharply increasing their potential value. 

Opposition parties believe these moves have strong parallels with what Ford's government did in selecting 15 parcels of Greenbelt land for housing development, potentially boosting their value by $8.3 billion, until ultimately reversing course last month.

That's prompting calls for investigations into the Hamilton and Ottawa boundary changes, focused on why certain land parcels were picked despite objections from each city council. 

"We see some connections … and we want to get to the bottom of it," said NDP Leader Marit Stiles. 

Stiles wrote to Ontario's auditor general's office on Friday to request an investigation into the government's expansions of urban boundaries in Ottawa and Hamilton, as well as its changes to other official land-use plans, such as Waterloo, Niagara and York regions.

Despite requests from both municipalities for a review, so far the government is hanging tight, with perennial carbuncle and toadie Paul Callandra, the current minister of housing, insisting that the expansions are needed to meet their housing goals, again ignoring all the data that show existing lands within the boundaries are adequate.

So who benefits?

The most controversial property captured by the province's expansion of Ottawa's boundaries is prime agricultural land on Watters Road in Orléans, more than 20 kilometres from the city centre. 

• In February 2021, Ottawa city council explicitly excluded that 37-hectare farm when it voted on its own plans to enlarge the city's urban boundaries. 
• In August 2021, a newly incorporated company called 1177 Watters Developments Ltd. bought the farm for $12.7 million. 
• In November 2022, the Ford government made the land part of the City of Ottawa with the stroke of a pen. 

The company's five directors donated more than $12,000 to the Ontario PC Party in 2021 and 2022, CBC Ottawa's Kate Porter revealed last November.

Liberal Party interim leader John Fraser, the MPP for Ottawa South, questions why the government put this parcel into the city's boundaries. 

"You've got a group of people who buy a piece of land in 2021", said Fraser. "This is land that you're probably never going to build on, because it's zoned agricultural. And then all of a sudden this piece of land, totally inappropriate, appears [within the urban boundary] and then the value of that land triples." 

Over in Hamilton, the stench of corruption and insider information is the same.

In Hamilton, the province ordered the city last November to add 2,200 hectares, despite council's previous vote in favour of maintaining existing boundaries. 

Among the properties that were wrapped into Hamilton's new boundaries: land owned by some of the same people whose holdings were among the 15 parcels removed from the Greenbelt last November. 

As previously reported by CBC Hamilton's Samantha Beattie, the land added to Hamilton's urban boundaries includes properties owned in part by developers Sergio Manchia of UrbanCore Developments and Paul Paletta of Alinea Group Holdings, formerly Penta Properties. 

According to the Ontario integrity commissioner's report into the Greenbelt, the two developers used the same representative to make their requests both for Greenbelt removals and for changes to Hamilton's official plan. The urban boundary changes were part of the government's amendments to that official plan.  

And earlier reporting shows that the government met with developers, giving them advance notice of expansion  before speaking to Hamilton officials. 

There is a long time to go before the next provincial election, but those four years cut both ways. Ford et al. likely hope to ride out the storm, while those who truly care about this province also have plenty of time to keep up their attacks and investigations, one of their prime motivations being the hope that the malodourous corruption enveloping this province will finally dissipate after our next visit to the polls.