A bird’s eye view of some of Hamilton’s Greenbelt lands

A group of well-connected developers stand to make a lot of money after influencing Doug Ford’s provincial government’s process for choosing protected Greenbelt land to open up for housing, the province’s auditor general says.

Citing the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation, which is responsible for calculating property values in Ontario, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk estimates the landowners of the 15 sites that were removed could see their value increase by $8.3 billion.

Hamilton’s Mayor Andrea Horwath is calling on Premier Ford to abandon his plan to open up parts of the Greenbelt for development after Lysyk released her report on Wednesday.

“The proposed development of the Greenbelt is an unnecessary, ineffective, and misguided measure that will not contribute to meeting Hamilton’s housing needs,” Horwath said Wednesday.

The Greenbelt is a vast 810,000-hectare area of farmland, forest and wetland stretching from Niagara Falls to Peterborough that was meant to be off limits to development.

Lysyk said at a news conference at Queen’s Park on Wednesday “our review … raises serious concerns about the exercises used, the way in which standard information gathering and decision protocols were sidelined and abandoned, and how changes to the Greenbelt were unnecessarily rushed through.” 

“The process was biased in favour of certain developers and landowners who had timely access to the housing minister’s chief of staff,” she said.

The parcels of land in Hamilton include:

There are also two parcels near the Hamilton-Niagara border including: