Ontario’s premier has reversed course on a controversial multibillion-dollar land swap deal, saying it was a “mistake” to allow development in protected areas of the green belt around Toronto. The abrupt reversal comes after the scandal has cost him a pair of cabinet ministers, two damning reports from government watchdogs and mounting public outrage.
“I made a promise to you that I wouldn’t touch the Greenbelt. I broke that promise. And for that, I am very, very sorry,” Doug Ford told reporters on Thursday afternoon. “It was a mistake to open the Greenbelt … I’m not perfect. No government is perfect.”
Ontario’s Greenbelt, established in 2005, spans 2m acres (800,000 hectares) of farmland, forest, rivers and lakes around Toronto, and is meant to prevent unchecked urban sprawl and ensure protections for environmentally sensitive land.
Last year, the governing Progressive Conservative government said it would remove 7,400 acres from the Greenbelt in order to build 50,000 homes. Ford said his government would replace the land with nearly 9,400 acres elsewhere. But the decision to develop Greenbelt lands marked a reversal of previous promises from Ford, who had pledged to leave protected areas untouched.
On Wednesday, Kaleed Rasheed, Ontario’s minister of public and business service delivery, resigned from his party’s legislative caucus following contradicting accounts of a Las Vegas trip, which the province’s integrity commissioner investigated as part of a broader look at the controversial Greenbelt deal. The resignation came two weeks after Ford’s housing minister also stepped down.
A damning 30 August report from Ontario’s independent integrity commissioner, J David Wake, concluded that Ford’s housing minister Clark had breached the law over the removal of lands from the Greenbelt and that the plan contained elements of “misinterpretation, unnecessary hastiness and deception”.
Earlier in August, Ontario’s auditor general found that the government’s plan would benefit certain developers and landowners, adding C$8.3bn ($6.10bn) to the value of the properties. The report, which investigated how Clark’s chief of staff, Ryan Amato, led internal government efforts to select the lands for development, found most of the properties selected for removal from the Greenbelt were those suggested by developers. Amato later resigned.
His government previously justified the decision as part of a broader effort to address a mounting housing crisis in the province, promising to build at least 1.5m homes by 2031. Critics say there are other ways to increase housing that do not require building on protected lands. “Nothing is more important than building homes,” he said recently in defense of the plan.
“When I make a mistake, I’ll fix them. And I’ll learn from them,” a contrite Ford said on Thursday. “In the next election, you’ll have a chance to decide how I’ve done.”
