Episode 7- Premier Doug Ford is rebranding the Greenbelt Scandal (and hopes we won't notice)

The podcast host, Bill Kelly, discusses the political situation in Ontario, particularly focusing on the actions of Ontario Premier Doug Ford. Ford has faced backlash for his decision to expand the urban boundary and build a new highway, both of which have negative implications for agriculture and the environment. Additionally, two key ministers, Steve Clark and Monty McNaughton, have resigned, suggesting a lack of confidence in Ford's leadership. Ford's apology for his actions has not been well received, and he is facing criticism from the public. However, it remains to be seen how this will affect his chances in the next election. You're listening to the Bill Kelly Podcast. Here's your host, Bill Kelly. This is the Bill Kelly Podcast. Critical discussions for our critical times. I'm your host, Bill Kelly. And it's time to do a roundup on politics. And we were kind of going back and forth here about what's going on. I mean, there's a Manitoba election that's happening this week. Lots of stuff going on in B.C. politics as well. But a lot of the focus over the last little while has been in Ontario. And we're going to get to that in just a second, and also in federal politics. And the focus, of course, is on the two leaders, the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Ontario Premier, Doug Ford. And what's the old thing about being up your ass in alligators? I think both of them could relate to that with what's happened over the last couple of weeks in particular. Joining us to talk about this is the Badger, Richard Brennan, who covered Queen's Park and Parliament Hill for so many years. Great to have you on the show today. And before we get into all the politics and the mudslinging and everything else, happy birthday. Thank you. This is a big day for you. Yeah, it is. One foot in front of the other, you know. Congratulations on that. It's your son's birthday. It's my granddaughter's birthday. So there's a lot going on here. It's an important day. It is. And let's talk a little bit about what's going to be happening. And I wanted to focus, if we could, Badger, on those two leaders, because we've been talking about them a lot in the last little while. Are they going to survive? One more than the other, I guess, because Doug Ford is, of course, in a majority government situation. And how could he possibly mess that up? But he's sure trying, isn't he? Oh, in a big way. And he's not done yet, Bill. That's the thing. You know, he's announced that he's going to put all those lands back in the greenbelt, and he's sorry, but there's plan B. And plan B is the 413. So if he builds a 413, which he says he will, that, again, helps his buddies, the developers. So he lost in plan A. This is plan B. And that will be a big boon to the development industry when that highway goes up to wherever it's supposed to come, south of Barrie. And he's not done. And in Hamilton, he got around it there by still taking out the greenbelt, but calling it a municipal boundary expansion. Forcing it on the city by the way. But we have to extend this boundary in order to bring in housing. Hamilton was dead against it, but he did it anyway. And isn't one of the owners of the property there a friend of the Premier? And he's going to benefit tremendously by that decision. Yeah, clarify that if you could, because I think a lot of people just heard the story, or maybe read the headline, which is often the case, of course, and they've made, oh, he's had a come-to-Jesus moment now, and he's going to, I'm sorry I made a mistake, blah, blah, blah. He hasn't really fixed the problem, has he? He's said, OK, those parcels, those parcels. As you talked about, Hamilton's still going to have to deal with this urban boundary expansion, and that's going to be a big headache. The Globe and Mail's reporting this morning that apparently there's two other tracts of land just north of Toronto that he's not touching. I mean, he's given them special consideration, one of those ministerial orders to go ahead and do that. He didn't even talk about that, so it wasn't included in that announcement that he made a week and a half or so ago. So that one's going to go on, and he's going to expand to Fruitlands and the very sensitive environmental area called the Oak Ridges Moraine. They're going to start building houses on that, so he has not really recanted on this, has he? As far as I'm concerned, he hasn't learned a thing. I mean, he might have, like you said, this come-to-Jesus moment. Well, that lasted about 30 seconds, quite frankly. And what we're seeing now is him getting around that announcement and saying, okay, we're not going to do this, but don't look over here, folks, because we're going to do that over there. So, like I say, Plan B is almost as good as Plan A, and he is determined, determined beyond determined, to make sure that he feathers the nest of the developers. It's quite unbelievable when you think of it. Well, and as you say, it seems to be a full war ahead, and he's going to get this thing done one way or another, despite the ramifications. The piece of property you're talking about with the 413, that particular highway, and there's also, of course, another project that he wants to do just south of Barry that's going to have an impact on, well, what I consider to be one of the most profitable and lush agricultural areas probably in North America, and that's the Harlem Marsh. You can't do something like that, Badger, as you wrote about. You can't do something like that right beside the Harlem Marsh and not have it impact the Harlem Marsh. Water tables are everywhere, and if you're going to do something here, it's going to have an impact over here. They don't seem to care about that. That whole area, the Oak Ridges Marine, particularly the Oak Ridges Marine and the Harlem Marsh, are very important areas to agriculture. I mean, like you say, that canal area, as we call it, is probably the most prime agriculture land in North America, and that highway, the way it's being proposed, is going to cut through that. It's exasperating for anybody that lives in that area, for anybody that's an environmentalist, for anybody that just wants to see things left alone, and that's not going to happen. I mean, if you build that highway 413, it's going to have a huge impact. It crosses all kinds of water tables, like you say, swampy areas, et cetera, et cetera, for a highway that many municipalities that are affected by it say it's not necessary. Well, and the studies I've seen that do say, okay, let's see if there is any merit to this. I think they suggest that if you did this, what's it going to save? For people that are making that drive from that point to this point, I think they save five minutes, something like that. It's a ridiculously low number, so it's hardly worth it. And so the justification for it simply isn't there, but of course the justification for the urban boundary expansion wasn't there either. But there's an impact on this. As we've talked about, I think, on a previous program, Steve Clark, who was the municipal affairs minister previously to this, and this was all over him, I mean, he has resigned. So there's somebody else in that portfolio now, so there was going to be a cabinet shuffle. But then a surprise announcement, I think it was just the day after that, when his labor minister, Monty McNaughton, resigned. Now, when you're knee-deep in doo-doo here, you don't want probably the most respected guy in your cabinet jumping off ship, and that seems to be what happened here. Yeah, it's interesting. Monty is a very decent man. Yeah. I've known him for some years now. I can remember when he first arrived, and I think I took a picture at the time of his little girl coming up the main steps of Queens Park. But he's a decent man, and I don't know the background on this. I haven't chatted with him about why he left, but boy, you don't have to be a mathematician to figure this out, that he's probably thinking, you know, maybe I've had enough of this. Because really, what kind of voice do they have in that cabinet? Everything comes right down from the premier, which is not usual, I know, and he was a good labor minister. He did a very decent job in terms of getting labor on side with the conservative government. I think that's going to slide because he's not there. I think it's going to slide anyway because of, you know, the approach he's taking to government. Well, let's talk about that. And I can say, I respected him, I had him on the show numerous times because he was a newsmaker. You know, the PC party of Ontario spent very little time or attention with organized labor. As a matter of fact, there was usually a very antagonistic relationship between the two sides. The Harris government comes to mind. So, you know, pretty much every time there's a provincial election, they just wrote off the labor vote and simply said, well, they're all going to vote NDP, maybe a few of them to the liberals because of some of the education things that McKinney and others were doing. But McNaughton, I think, was one of the key factors in bringing the labor, at least organized labor, construction industries, et cetera, behind Doug Ford, which nobody ever thought they were going to see in their lifetime. And you're right. I mean, the stories I've heard about him, he's a decent guy, obviously small C conservative with his values, but he's not pompous. He's a little bombast there. He doesn't step in the muck like a lot of his cabinet colleagues do on a pretty regular basis. You can't afford to lose guys like that. No. I think, you know, I mean, I'm not covering Cleanth Park anymore, but I did cover when he was there when he was in the opposition. I think it's a big loss. Whether Mr. Ford, the Premier, knows that or realizes that or even cares, that's who knows. But I really do. I think that's a big loss for him. He's, you know, how can I put it, Bill? He's broken faith with the public. And that's hard to repair. This whole Greenbelt thing, I don't think he ever thought in his wildest nightmares that this was going to have the backlash it has. And then he had to apologize and said we did the wrong thing. Well, he knew right from the outset he was doing the wrong thing, but he got caught. And now he's saying, okay, I'm sorry. People aren't going to forgive him. We're a long ways away from the election. But right now he's persona non grata with a lot of people. But he's been down this road before and not only survived, but of course in the last election he even increased his majority. But I think, as you've mentioned, with previous governments, both federal and provincial governments, there is a breaking point, isn't there? I mean, you're right. I think a lot of politicians figure, okay, this is going to be a really tough decision. I'm going to get a lot of shit for this from a lot of different circles. But it dies down because this is Canada. After a week or two, especially over the summer break, everybody will just forget about this because they're busy doing other things with their lives. This one's not going away, this issue. And I think you've nailed it. It's not necessarily... Yes, they're upset about incursions into the Green Belt, but I think they're more upset about the fact that he lied 35 times. He vowed that he was not going to do this and then he went ahead and did it anyway. Everybody's allowed to make a mistake and say, okay, I screwed up. Give me another shot at this. But 35 different times, he and Minister Clark said, this is not going to happen. We're not going into the Green Belt and then he turned to it. So a lot of people are questioning right now, what can I trust anything this guy says? And some of your former colleagues at Queens Parkage are having a field day with this. This whole policy of urban expansion apparently is being determined on a massage parlor bed in Las Vegas because somebody got a big check and one of the deputy ministers was there. That's not the way you're supposed to be running the government. Well, who's he... It really raises the question, though. Who's he governing for? Is he governing for you and I and the folks down in Elko or Defasco or trying to put food on the table right across this province? Is he worried about them? It doesn't appear so. He's worried about developers. Imagine it. The figure was that if that had gone through, these developers were going to reap $8 billion. Well, that's based... Those figures are based on 2015 figures. So you know it's probably upwards of $10 billion that they were going to reap if that had gone through. And here's people trying to make ends meet with the increased cost of living, be it gasoline, be it food, whatever. Everything's high these days. And he's worried about developers? I'm sorry, it just... It doesn't make sense. People are going to hold this against him. How long they do is another question. But this is sticking against the wall for him. Well, and I guess what exacerbates the situation is there are, in some circles anyway, still mixed messages coming out about this. I mean some of your former colleagues columnists in some of the Toronto papers for instance and a couple of them in Ottawa are still saying, look it, you know, Ford did this in the best of interest. We need housing in this province. And this was going to be the solution to it. And now these guys have come along here and they've undercut the Premier and now we're going to be in even a deeper crisis. That's a load of crap. Do you really... Do these people really... And these are people I like. I read their columns. I respect their ability as journalists. But you can't let partisanship rule when you're trying to inform people about things like this. If you're a small C conservative or even a supporter of the PC party in Ontario, God bless you. That's fine. But at the same time, you've got to face the facts and say, hey, they screwed up here. And that's just not the case these days. There is no bloody way that whoever owns that land that was freed up anyway, they were going to build affordable housing on it. You know damn well what they were going to build there and it's not going to do anything to solve the housing crisis. We need housing. I mean, that's beyond question. They know it federally. They're looking at it federally. They're looking at it everywhere across this country. But you don't... He had... He struck a task force that told him, you don't need this land. There's lots of land available, already available within the municipal boundaries and elsewhere for housing that you don't need to, you know, cut up the greenbelt. And he ignored it entirely. You know what I find interesting about that? That report, and Tim Hudak was on that committee, and you know Tim of course when he was the leader of the PC party in Ontario in opposition. When they did that work, and I had Tim on the show a couple of times as they were doing their show, polling show around the province, gathering information. I was interested, very interested when the report came out and they specifically said you don't need the greenbelt. And I wonder why they put that in because Ford wasn't even talking about greenbelt expansion then. There was a story when he first got elected, yeah, that he promised some developers that and he said, no, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. So that was a non-issue as far as most people were concerned. Unless some of those people on that committee that were doing the research knew something that we didn't know even back then. Well, Tim's not an idiot. He knows that's percolating somewhere in the government, be it not publicly maybe, but he was aware that this was being a consideration. And so what he was trying to do was, you know, water that down or get rid of it altogether. But, unfortunately, he didn't. Then it came along and then it backfired and now they backed out. They backpedaled. Kind of. Kind of they backpedaled. They haven't entirely, as you pointed out. He's, I don't know, I've got to get back to say that he's broken face with the public and that is entirely hard to mend. And whether he's able to do it remains to be seen. All right. I've got just a few seconds left. I want to spend on this and then I want to talk about the guys up in Ottawa. So you've got a government that, yeah, they're in a majority situation, but when they're back to the wall like this, like this, that's when the opposition is supposed to come out with guns blazing. The liberals don't even have a leader at this stage. They've got an interim leader. Mark Stiles, the NDP leader, of course, is now the leader of the opposition when she ascended to that job. Are there people capable of holding this government to account in the legislature and in question period? Because if not, this does become an issue. People may not forgive, but they will forget over a period of time. I think the NDP leader is doing a pretty good job myself. Okay. She's holding their feet to the fire. She just won't let up. You've got to remember, she's the one that initiated this whole thing with the Auditor General. So, no, I think she's doing a pretty good job in terms of just saying, keeping this on the front page. And now, you know, the NDP are calling for another investigation by the Auditor General into the Hamilton situation. Yeah. This has got a lot of legs, Bill. And it's running. And when it's going to stop, I don't know. Well, it's hard for government to govern when they're playing defense all the time. And that seems to be the posture of the Ford government right now. Which is, I guess, as good a segue as we can get to by switching our focus from Queen's Park in Toronto to what's going on in Ottawa these days. You've got a Prime Minister who is not in a majority situation. He's being, essentially, staying in power. He's being propped up by the NDP and the deal that they had. And we all know about that. But I've got to think, though, I've got to think, though, Vaggie. Jock Mead Sink's sitting there saying, wait a minute, this is not what I signed up for. We wanted to get some things done like dental care packages and pharma care and stuff like this. But I didn't think he'd be going around doing this sort of crap. And the latest, of course, was recognizing a former Nazi, I guess, during the visit, of course, from the Ukrainian President. And that sounds bad enough. But the reaction to it and the Prime Minister's non-reaction to it initially is just digging himself deeper into this hole that he seems to find himself in. I don't know if he can stick around, Bill. I really don't. If he sticks around, we're looking at another Kathleen Wynne situation here. Where if he goes in the next election, I think he could just set that party back and it feels like it's not been set back before. People are tired of him. They've made it painfully honest. And poll after poll after poll since the conservatives are leading. And I know he's pretty good on the election trail, but not that good. Does he care that his party seems to be going down the dumper? Well, that's a good question. He's a bit entitled, let's face it. I've always referred to him as an over-aged frat boy. And he's entitled. Now, whether he's crazy enough to drive the bus right off the bridge remains to be seen. But the way it looks right now, he is determined, he's said over and over again that he's going to run again. I think it would be a fatal mistake for the liberals. Because I really believe that the divide is just too much for him to bridge. And the irony here, I guess, is these are really non-policy issues that are sinking him. It's the way in which he handles these issues and the way in which he handles people and staff in situations like this that I think are really getting under the skin of an awful lot of Canadians these days. And, you know, you've got to kind of remove some of the BS and the rhetoric from Polyev and some of the others about their characterizations of some of these things. Because he's just that true. I mean, you know, he blames this whole thing, of course, about the Nazi thing during the visit. It's all Trudeau's fault. Let's not. And I'm not defending Trudeau because everybody knows how I feel about Trudeau. But I was watching CTV the next day and Tom Mulcair came on, of course, the former NDP leader. And he says, that's just not true. He says, that doesn't absolve Trudeau by any stretch of the imagination. But that was clearly the Speaker's job. And he screwed this thing up royally. But he's the Prime Minister and he's got to respond to this and react to this. And he just didn't do it. Eventually he comes out with a half-hearted apology. And that's too little too late in most people's minds. He's always too little too late. That's the problem. You know, to suggest that he's responsible for that, you know, the former Nazi, you know, being allotted in the House, that's not, as you point out, that's not Trudeau's fault. I mean, it's just nonsense. But at the end of the day, he is the Premier. But to suggest that, you know, got to remember, they all raced. They all got on their feet and clapped. It wasn't just the Liberals or, you know, the Bloc. Everybody did. So they're all culpable in a way. And to suggest that, you know, one is more culpable than the other is nonsense. And Justin Trudeau did not appoint the Speaker. That was elected by Parliament. So, you know, and you can't vet every decision. I mean, he has to be responsible. And he's gone. That's all well and good. But there's another interesting story that appeared in the Toronto Star that I wanted to raise with you today. It was just in the Monday edition of the Star. Basically suggesting that, look it, there's going to be a new Speaker that's going to be voted again by Parliament. This is probably the low point when it comes to, I'm going to use parliamentary procedure and parliamentary ethics, which I think is now an oxymoron. Who can they elect to that particular job? Who can bring these guys back and stop the clown show? I mean, these guys look like a bunch of kindergarten kids on the sugar high each and every day and nobody seems to be able to control it. I don't know if anybody can control it, though. I mean, it would take an iron fist to do it. I mean, it would mean throwing some of these clowns out, saying outrageous things that you wouldn't say in a school yard. You know, talking to each other, taunting each other, like there's some kind of gang. It's beyond the pale. Whoever takes over is going to have their hands full. And I don't know who's going to want to even step up to that. There's a lot of pluses to being the Speaker, believe me. You know, the residents, the summer cottage and the Quebec and everything else. It's a great job but it has its responsibilities and one of those responsibilities is running Parliament on a day-to-day basis and making these members behave in some kind of adult fashion. Whether it can be done, God bless the person who gets the job and does it, it's going to be a tough one. For however long it might be because I'm starting to hear rumors once again about whether or not the NDP are going to maintain support for this thing. And I think we all know the dynamic here that Jagmeet Singh may have to hold his nose on an awful lot of stuff just to keep this government in power because there are some things he still wants to see happen vis-à-vis his agenda. And there's no way that he's ever going to get anything from a polyamor if he were to become Prime Minister. So there's that element of it. But to your point, Trudeau rules the Liberal Party with an iron fist, as Jody Wilson-Raybould and others can attest. Even this last cabinet shuffle, people who seemingly had some leadership ambitions, like Anita Anand and others, basically got shoved off to the side or out of the cabinet or at least lower positions within the cabinet, which was to send a message, I guess, back off. I'm still the guy that's running the show here. But there's got to be a point, though, Badger, where they're going to say, I don't care what kind of stuff he's going to throw at me in return, for the sake of the party. I mean, he's got to go. That's all there is to it. They're whispering it. We all know they're whispering that in the back halls of Parliament. You sure know that every MP, every Liberal MP, got an earful from their constituents during the summer break. And at what point did they start speaking up and saying, I don't give a shit what you think, Mr. Prime Minister. You've got to go. Mark Carney already started that. There's not much Trudeau could do to Mark Carney because he's not in cabinet. But others are going to start following at some point, I think. Well, you would think he would want to encourage people to show interest in his job at this point. I mean, he's not going to be around forever. You know, what about a little mentoring and looking at the people that hold Prime Minister qualities? But he can't, for some reason. He just can't. He can't get out of his own way. And it's going to be the downfall of that party. It absolutely is. If somebody can't sit down, and I don't expect his staff around because I think they're nothing but a bunch of guest people. Somebody's got to sit down with him who's got a lot of credibility. It might be John Kretchen, for example, and say, it's time for you to take a walk in the snow, pal, because if you don't, we're in trouble. Well, the party's already in trouble and I've got to figure there's other voices that are suggesting that something like that has done, has to be done, rather. But is it salvageable? I mean, let's assume 2025 is going to be the next election. By one way or another, the Liberals hang on to power until that prescribed date. Is there somebody that can take the reins of that party and turn things around? Because right now, Polyam is winning by attrition. You know, poll after poll indicates that Canadians still don't like the guy. They don't trust him, they don't like, you know, they say, well, they don't know him very well. I think it's because they don't want to know him very well, because what they see so far, they don't like. But they're not going to, you know, they're not going to say, well, then I'll give this other guy a chance, even, all the crap that he's been going through over the last number of years. The Liberals are going to have to do something aggressive here, or, as you say, they're going to become a non-entity on the federal scene, just like, you know, Kim Campbell, and poor Kim Campbell got thrown into the Lions. You know, it wasn't her fault, it was the Mulroney government that was going down the dumper. The Wynne government did the same thing here in Ontario. And I'm sure that these people can read political history, and they know that there's almost an inevitable feeling right now that that's what's going to happen to the Liberals if they don't smarten up. Yeah, if Pauly Ed wins, it'll be by default. You know, I mean, basically, he, I mean, I don't, I think a lot of Canadians don't realize who this guy is. And when they do, a lot of them won't like what they're seeing. But is, will it be enough? People are just, they've had it with Trudeau. That's all there is to it. I mean, we all reach, you know, if we were in politics, you all reach a point where people say, you know, time for you to go. We don't like what you're doing, we're just basically sick of looking at you. It's in simple terms. And that's the message, clear and simple, that I get almost every day from people, that they just want him gone. Well, it's going to be interesting to see just how this happens, and if it's going to happen, of course, simply because of the fallout. And these are issues, as you say, that aren't going to go away. The Nazi issue, as bad as it was, and, you know, a pox on the Speaker and a pox on the Prime Minister for being so slow to react to that sort of thing. The outrage, of course, is palpable here, but mind you, I think some of that is very calculated outrage, because as one of your former colleagues wrote in the Toronto Star last week, it seems to be very prescribed outrage. I mean, they're not making any sort of an outrage about some of the stuff that their own MPs are saying or who they're associating with. That extreme right-wing leader from Europe that was over there, and there's Dean Allison and a bunch of other MPs having lunch with them. But there's nothing said about that, and Polyev didn't do anything with those people in his caucus. So it's pretty selective, but that's the way they play politics. Why would Polyev do anything to his own people for whoever they hang around with? Here's a guy that was, you know, did the truckers business up in Ottawa, where they were breaking the law without question, and it went beyond just having a protest. They broke the law, and he's out there slapping them on the back and saying, hooray for you guys. You're doing a great job. So how can he lecture anybody else about who they might meet with or go see? We're just about out of time, but one final thing I did want to run past you. We've been talking about, is Justin Trudeau going to survive? Is he going to step down? Is he going to be forced out? Whatever the case might be. But when we're talking about what was going on here with the Ontario circumstance, and we talk about the fact that there's a provincial election coming up, there's some people not speaking loudly anyway, Badger, but they're asking, I think somewhat rhetorically at this stage, is Doug Ford even going to stick around for the next election? He's apparently got a very thin skin. I think we can probably say that with a fair amount of certainty based on the way he's reacted to some of the criticism that's going on. He doesn't need this job. I mean, everybody loves power. We all know that. That's what politicians just gravitate towards, is the idea of having more power. But is it going to be worth it for him? Right now, he's got the development community pissed off at him. He's got a lot of municipalities pissed off at him. He may just say, enough is enough. I'm going to go riding off to Muskoka and live out my days there. Or is the ego that big that he wants to hang out and stay here? I think a lot of it has to do with ego. But I think he wants to stick around to get that highway through. He wants to say, okay, boys, I couldn't get through Plan A, but Plan B, I can do. And I think he will stick around to make sure that that's a done deal. Well, I guess the other element to this, too, is who are the liberals going to pick as a leader to lead them into the next election. We have no idea who's that going to be right now, but that's going to be great fodder for another conversation down the road. Badger, as always, thank you so much. Great talking with you again. Stay well. Again, happy birthday to you. And we'll talk again soon. Okay, Bill. Thanks again. Take care. Richard Brennan, of course, who covered Queen's Park and Parliament Hill for so many years. And that's it for this edition of the Bill Kelly Podcast. Thank you for listening and thank you for subscribing. I leave you with the words of wisdom from Winston Churchill, who said, to improve is to change. 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