Speaking days after an explosive auditor general report, Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy argued that Ontarians appreciate his government's fiscal prudence and pro-builder stance, even as the Greenbelt controversy threatened to overshadow Monday's economic update.
The largest swath of land removed from the Greenbelt, the Duffins-Rouge Agricultural Preserve, was in Bethlenfalvy's Pickering riding. Hundreds protested outside his office over the weekend.
Asked by reporters at Queen's Park if the controversy is overshadowing his economic update, which found that things are largely the same as the government planned in the budget, Bethlenfalvy said he doesn't think so.
"I didn't say nobody cares," he added when pressed. "What I did say is that we're going to continue our focus to make sure that we do our responsibility to make sure the infrastructure is there."
It was the protesters' "democratic right" to register their frustration outside his office this weekend, Bethlenfalvy said. But he argued more people are concerned with finding an affordable place to live than the Greenbelt controversy.
People in his riding "talk to me about the high cost of rent. They talk about the high cost of the dream of owning a home," he said, noting that there are a lot of new immigrants in Pickering. "The people on the street ... that I talk to say, build."
As Green Leader Mike Schreiner noted in a press release shortly after Bethlenfalvy's presser, the formerly protected land did not need to be removed for Ontario to meet its housing targets.
"Report after report — including one from the government’s own housing task force and last week’s bombshell from the Auditor General — have concluded that we already have enough land to build the homes that we desperately need," he said.
Bethlenfalvy pushed back on that reasoning, saying the housing task force report came when Ontario had fewer people in it.
"I mean, 500,000 people, that's a significant amount of people," he said.
Bethlenfalvy said he hasn't met with developers about removing lands in his riding from the Greenbelt, adding that he was briefed about the land removals the same day cabinet was.
But some mayors and councils in the region have been advocating for those lands to be developed for "decades," he said.
Pickering council voted against developing the lands in December.
Shortly after Bethlenfalvy's presser, the premier's office released to media a memo sent to all chiefs of staff and deputy ministers announcing a working group had been formed to implement 14 of the 15 recommendations from the auditor general report, and reminding them to follow cabinet submission and conflict-of-interest processes in the meantime.
Most of the recommendations related to how political staff work with the public service, stakeholders, lobbyists, and others. One recommends the government refer the housing minister's chief of staff, Ryan Amato, to the integrity commissioner for a potential investigation. He was the central figure in the auditor general's report and selected much of the land to be evaluated for removal from the Greenbelt. Premier Doug Ford and Housing Minister Steve Clark have maintained they didn't know much of what he was up to.
"Every public servant has an ethics executive to whom they should disclose any actual or potential conflicts of interest," read the memo, which was signed by Ford chief of staff Patrick Sackville and cabinet secretary Michelle DiEmanuele.
The finance minister spoke from the same playbook that Ford and Clark used last week, which boils down to two parts. The admission: the process for selecting lands to be removed from the Greenbelt could've been better. The justification: there are a lot of people coming to Ontario and they need places to live.
While the government has said it will implement 14 of the auditor general's 15 recommendations, he wouldn't budge on the last one: to consider reversing the land swaps.
"With 500,000 people coming to this province last year, and who knows what number that will be this year, we have an absolute responsibility to the people of Ontario to continue to build houses. There's no question," he said.
The headache is likely far from over for the government as opposition parties continue to make hay. NDP Leader Marit Stiles will be at the Duffins-Rouge preserve Tuesday morning with community leaders to host the media.
