Doing fraud in Ford country

Land corruption in Ontario? Same as it ever was.

Rattlesnake Point, named after, I am guessing, the extinct Mississauga Rattlesnake. I used to stare at this out the window of every west-facing classroom I had in high school. Part of the Greenbelt.

Ontario politics is aflutter with the news that Doug Ford did corruption when he removed 15 sites from the Greenbelt and allowed their sale to developers who stood to make $8.5 billion. This is all detailed in a recent Auditor General’s report.

A few people reminded me that I had written about this probably happening, five years ago, as it was obviously going to happen. Thanks to documents obtained from Canadaland, I looked at the connection between developers, Ontario Proud and Doug Ford in a piece I published at Medium.

You should read the piece but here’s how I conclude: “As Ontario Proud pretends to care about “the many” and as so many of its page’s fans rail against “elites” like Liberal politicians or effeminate men, it’s a good reminder that none of their content is popular. None of it comes from average people. It comes from men who stand to make ridiculous money off of Doug Ford and his policies. It’s concentrated, isolated and powerful. Together, these groups raised $500,000 in a year (the organization that I work for, with nearly 200 members, only brings in about 1/5 of that).”

Ontario Proud helped grease support for the Conservatives in highly successful online campaigns. I also wrote about them in 2018 in an article that really, you should read, because the same people, same tactics and same everything are working to keep Ford popular enough and turn Pierre Poilievre into something that isn’t a steaming pile of cringe.

Anyway, nothing I wrote was particularly prophetic. If you know anything about Ontario, it’s this: land exists solely to make men exceedingly wealthy and those men buy politicians. And it’s been this way since before Ontario was Ontario. The province comes by it honestly.

If you go back (waaay back), you’ll find yourself in a pre-Ontario colony that was run by a group called by its critics the Family Compact. These powerful men were committed to keeping democracy out of the colony — something that they thought resembled mob rule (till they realized that they could just pervert the hell out of democracy and sell it to us and we’d happily eat it up, as we insist that we live in a democracy).

In addition to running the governance strcutures of the colony, the Family Compact, “also controlled land grants, which they gave out along partisan lines. The Church of England, the Bank of Upper Canada, the Canada Company and the Law Society of Upper Canada formed the basis of Family Compact power. Influence over these institutions ensured that the Family Compact held financial, spiritual, legal and administrative authority over the colony.”

Because Ontario was just a colony, there wasn’t exactly a class structure in place yet. The colony was run by England and colonialists who were in charge wanted to create a class structure that the new white settlement would be bound by. The Family Compact was Ontario’s first elite and key to cementing this elite was through land grants.

The Family Compact parceled out parts of Ontario and a lot of it went to themselves, their family members and politicial allies. They listened to appeals for land and decided who should get what. Like Peter Russell, who accumulated thousands of acres of land while also being appointed, “as collector of customs, auditor & receiver general of all government rents, lands & profits, justice of the Court of Common Pleas and justice of the King's Bench.”

Today, Ontario isn’t ruled by the same Family Compact. We have responsible government now! Democracy exists! Never mind that many of the developers who have politically backed Ford and who benefit from him being in office were present at his daughter’s wedding (bearing what gifts, I wonder). While this might seem weird when you’re not the upper crust, it’s business as usual for the elites. But still, Ford was voted in.

And the developers weren’t given their land. They bought it. From the Narwhal and the Toronto Star, one of the developers in question, Silvio De Gasperis had his land, “Purchased mostly in 2003 — with one lot added in 2004 and two in 2016 — for a combined $8.6 million, the lands add up to more than 1,300 acres. All are slated to be removed from the Greenbelt” (the article is from 2022 and the lands were removed from the Greenbelt). When the Liberals created the Greenbelt in 2005, De Gasperis lost his mind, as the Globe and Mail’s John Barber reported in 2005, “But now the greenbelt has inspired one of the richest and most powerful landowners in Ontario to declare war on the government -- and to embarrass it badly with his opening salvo -- so we know [the new Greenbelt legislation] has bite.”

But it isn’t just that a rich man bought some land. The land of the Greenbelt had been provincial land up until pretty recently — made provincial to protect it. Again, here’s Barber: “The land in question, which stretches north and east of the Toronto Zoo, was expropriated by the province in the 1970s and first declared off limits to development more than a decade ago by the Bob Rae government. The Harris government subsequently decided to sell it off, but yielded to local opposition by agreeing to attach easements to each new title that stipulated the land be used for farming forever -- and by selling it at ultra-low agricultural prices.

Cabinet ministers insisted that agricultural zoning and the easements would combine to keep speculators at bay indefinitely. Unimpressed, the speculators quickly gained control of almost all the land.”

Barber argued that this land was never supposed to be big money for these developers. De Gasparis bought it knowing that it he waited long enough, someone would come along and give him the chance to milk it for billions. And here we are.

It’s possible that citizen opposition will save the Greenbelt again. It’s activism that has saved it all these years. But working against average people who don’t want Southern Ontario to turn into suburban hell in overdrive is its own history — and in a fight against one’s own history, you need to be very organized to win.

Luckily conservationism is also a WASPy virtue.