Rushed zoning orders, Ontario Place’s skyrocketing cost and a coyote hunting contest: auditor general’s environment notes

As the Ontario government tries to put the Greenbelt scandal in the rearview, a new set of withering auditor general reports suggest the road ahead is laden with similar political hazards. 

During the Greenbelt scandal in 2023 Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives came under fire — fuelled by a scathing auditor general report — for giving preferential treatment to developers, and following processes that were biased and lacked transparency. 

The independent watchdog’s 2024 annual report, delivered on Tuesday, found similar problems in different places. Like the government’s use of a controversial development power called minister’s zoning orders, which in a few cases involved intervention from top political staff — similar to work allegedly done by ex-staffer Ryan Amato on the Greenbelt file. Or the province’s controversial push to redevelop the Ontario Place site on Toronto’s waterfront, which the auditor general said was “not fair, transparent or accountable.”

The nine reports on a wide array of subjects are the first batch to be delivered by Ontario’s new auditor general, Shelley Spence, at the beginning of her 10-year term. Spence replaced Bonnie Lysyk, the author of the Greenbelt audit, in January.

Spence’s duties also include oversight of Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights. The bill enshrines the public’s right to transparency in government decisions about the environment, and overall Spence’s initial audits give the Progressive Conservatives’ a passing grade on this — though she also unearthed some problems, like an incident involving a contentious coyote hunt. 

Here’s a rundown of the juiciest findings from Spence’s reports.

Over a 4-year period, Progressive Conservatives’ prolific use of controversial zoning power plagued with problems

Ontario’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs created the “appearance of preferential treatment” in handing out a controversial land zoning power called a minister’s zoning order, or MZO, which can be used to override environmental concerns and fast-track development.

The decades-old power was meant to be used only in limited circumstances, such as emergencies or areas of northern Ontario without municipal governments. Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives used zoning orders 114 times between 2019 and 2023, compared to about one per year by the previous Liberal government.

The audit — which pointed to similar problems and involving some of the same people as the auditor’s Greenbelt report — found a former deputy chief of staff to ex-housing minister Steve Clark directed bureaucrats to prioritize four zoning order requests after being directly lobbied about them. 

For one of those four, the deputy chief of staff told bureaucrats the request to finalize the zoning order had come from the premier and Clark, who resigned last year amid the Greenbelt scandal. In another case, the deputy chief of staff personally edited the zoning order, directed staff to remove protections for natural features on the land and passed the developer’s exact wording for the order along to bureaucrats. 

The auditor general didn’t name the staffer, the lobbyists or the developers involved. Clark’s last deputy chief of staff, Kirstin Jensen, resigned amid the Greenbelt scandal. (Jensen, who now works for a housing industry lobby group, didn’t immediately answer questions from The Narwhal.) 

The auditor general’s office did an in-depth assessment of 25 zoning orders, and a lighter review of all 114 issued by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing between 2019 and 2023. Spence and her team found the ministry does little in the way of due diligence when it receives requests for minister’s zoning orders, and often doesn’t give the minister complete information about what’s being proposed.

The ministry didn’t check whether the orders were necessary or justified, didn’t consider whether projects could be hooked up to services like electricity and water, didn’t try to identify environmental risks or harm to farmland and didn’t consistently consult First Nations, the audit found. 

In 17 of the 25 zoning orders reviewed by the auditor general, the people behind the proposed development also made claims about benefits of the projects that were not supported by evidence. Ministry staff told the auditor they “do not assess the reasonableness or plausibility of the claims.”

Ministry staff also told the auditor general they weren’t able to provide full context, analysis and recommendations for the zoning orders because they were unable to keep up with skyrocketing numbers of requests from landowners and “pressure from the minister’s office” to deliver them on often tight deadlines. 

For critics, the report validates years of concerns about the controversial land zoning power, which can create enormous wealth for landowners, since land is worth much more money when it can be built on. The audit found 12 cases where landowners sold some or all of their land after receiving a minister’s zoning order. 

Most of the orders reviewed under the audit happened under Clark’s leadership. In the wake of the Greenbelt scandal, however, the government pulled back.

Shortly after Clark resigned last summer and the auditor general’s office announced plans to look into the minister’s zoning orders, new Housing Minister Paul Calandra announced an internal review of the mechanism. Months later, after reports of developers putting land with zoning orders up for sale, Calandra revoked and amended eight orders. He warned the landowners behind another 14 that they, too, could see their orders pulled if they didn’t make progress towards building. 

In April, the ministry also introduced a protocol to make the process of requesting a zoning order more consistent, as there was previously no standard or list of criteria. Spence’s report concluded the new — and optional — protocol could help standardize the process, but likely wouldn’t fix it entirely. 

Clark declined to comment on the audit at Queen’s Park, redirecting questions to his successor, Calandra. Calandra didn’t directly answer when asked if he would consider reversing the order the auditor alleged came from Clark and the premier. In general, the ministry will revoke the orders if developers don’t use them to build, he said.

“If it does not result in shovels in the ground, I do not hesitate to revoke an MZO,” Calandra said.

Irregularities with Ontario Place redevelopment — and climbing costs

The Ford government’s push to redevelop Ontario Place, a decommissioned theme park turned public green space on Toronto’s waterfront, has been rife with controversy since it first began in 2019. Now, the auditor general has found the process was “not fair, transparent or accountable” and not done using best practices. Its projected $424-million cost has also skyrocketed by an eye-popping $1.8 billion, with a new price tag at about $2.23 billion, Spence’s audit found.

The Progressive Conservatives want the Ontario Place site to host a private waterpark and spa run by European company Therme, a version of the recently shuttered Ontario Science Centre, a concert venue and a parking garage that could cost up to $400 million.

The project has come under fire from critics concerned about its environmental impact and how it could change public use of the space, which many people use now as a park. Most of the redevelopment work will not be required to undergo an environmental review, even though the site is home to several species at risk. The province started removing trees there this fall. 

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Spence’s audit found several problems with how the province hatched its plans for Ontario Place. For one, the government gave itself the right to select bids that didn’t meet its own criteria. Although companies that bid on the project weren’t supposed to have contact with the government while that process was underway, at least three were able to get meetings with the premier’s office and the Infrastructure Ministry, which is leading the redevelopment. An unnamed vice-president with Infrastructure Ontario, a Crown agency that is also involved with work on Ontario Place, also “communicated directly” with Therme and other companies during that period, the audit found.

Spence’s report also concluded the government’s recordkeeping on Ontario Place was sorely lacking — for example, it didn’t keep minutes of meetings.

Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma, who the government said was sick Tuesday, didn’t answer questions from reporters about the audit. Infrastructure Ontario CEO Michael Lindsay took them instead.

“Look, it was not me. I was not yet involved with Infrastructure Ontario,” Lindsay said, responding to questions about why the unnamed Infrastructure Ontario vice-president broke protocol. 

Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles called the process “corruption,” and for the premier to fire Surma.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones defended Surma Tuesday. Asked about the suggestion Surma be fired, Jones said she didn’t see why. “She’s actually leading some very important files and has made progress on them,” Jones said.

Ontario government continues to violate the Environmental Bill of Rights

In Ontario, the public has special power to participate in government decisions that relate to the environment, outlined in the province’s Environmental Bill of Rights. It requires the government to post detailed information about environmentally significant proposals on an online registry and consult the public for 30 days before making them final, among other things.

The Ford government violated the Environmental Bill of Rights several times from March 2023 to April 2024, the auditor found, as it has every year since forming government in 2018. Breaches have happened nearly every year for the last decade.

The auditor documented a laundry list of other problems. The government also exempted itself from the Environmental Bill of Rights for its redevelopment of Ontario Place in Toronto. It passed two bills, including one walking back a set of controversial land-use plans, without consulting the public for a full 30 days. And even when ministries did complete consultations, they couldn’t show how they took public feedback into account.

The auditor also looked at notices posted on the environmental registry and found nearly one in five lacked important context — for example, the Energy Ministry failed to explain the environmental consequences of a February 2024 decision meant to lower the costs of natural gas infrastructure, which could have serious impacts on increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

The government is also using the registry more and more to post “self-congratulatory” notices to promote its plans rather than inform the public about them, the auditor found. 

At times, the government has breached timelines laid out in the Environmental Bill of Rights. The auditor pointed to one odd case study that revolved around a coyote hunting contest hosted by a store in Belleville, Ont., which offered cash and prizes to people who brought dead coyotes to the shop.

Hunting for a prize or bounty is illegal in Ontario without government permission, and someone reported the contest to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry in March 2023. The ministry found the contest wasn’t likely to harm the environment and decided not to investigate — but the minister, Graydon Smith, asked staff to delay notifying the person who requested the investigation until 10 months after the deadline set out in the Environmental Bill of Rights.

“Nobody knew why they decided to put that on hold,” Spence said.

Smith’s office didn’t respond to questions about the incident.