Friday's tonic: "Doug Ford’s Greenbelt scheme betrayed the public — and he should pay dearly for that"

The buck stops with nobody!

The Ontario premier who came to power alleging corruption by a previous Liberal government now presides over a corrupted political process of his own making, Toronto Star's Martin Regg Cohn writes:

"...Obediently and quietly, this government rewrote the rules of the game — shifting timelines, contorting criteria, excluding experts, ignoring consultations — to shoehorn choice tracts of land into a gift-wrapped package approved by the premier. The developers didn’t so much win the lottery as the government rigged it — leaving all of us as losers.

“The buck stops with me,” the premier added predictably.

"What he didn’t say is that eight billion bucks won’t stop accruing to developers, courtesy of the same premier. And what he didn’t agree to do was reconsider the entire fiasco, as firmly recommended by the auditor’s report.

"A crusading populist who once conditioned the public to see corruption everywhere, Ford is now trying to persuade people that there is nothing to see here. In that sense, he is both the author of his own political misfortune and the instigator of the public’s suspicion and perception of corruption by his own government...

"...For it defies credulity — and integrity — when the head of government says he didn’t realize corners were cut when the Greenbelt was carved up. In truth, despite his hidden agenda, the disembowelling of the Greenbelt has been a personal project of the premier from first to last.

"Ford confided to potential donors, when seeking the Progressive Conservative leadership in 2018, that he would unravel the Greenbelt once he won power. When video of his private promise went public, he hurriedly and publicly promised to leave the protected lands untouched.

"Yet within weeks of winning re-election in 2022, Ford went back on his promise while moving forward with a false premise — that a surge in immigration and resettlement of 500,000 people a year requires more land to build 1.5 million more homes over a decade.

"The government’s own housing advisory task force and the legislature’s independent auditor general have both demolished that claim. In fact, there is more than enough land that can be released, rezoned and repurposed to meet the government’s building targets without resorting to the protected lands of the Greenbelt. In any case, as the auditor notes, the government had already met its specific housing targets last October, precisely one month before it took the draconian step of degrading those protected lands.

"Lost in this controversy is the potential folly of Ford’s hasty, seat-of-the-pants planning. By gaming and goosing the process, he has risked the reputation of his government without any assurance of success — for his own political prospects, the developer’s financial prospects, or the province’s housing potential."