Anushka Yadav, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Pointer

“I resigned from the government in 2017 because the Ford administration was coming to power, and I knew I couldn’t work for them.”

Victor Doyle’s worst fears have come true.

Over the past twenty years since Ontario created the Greenbelt, the world’s largest protected landscape of its kind, the man known as one of its central architects admits he’s relieved not to be inside the province’s planning offices anymore.

One of Ontario’s former senior planners and the co-designer of the Greenbelt legislation, recently spoke with The Pointer. 

His instincts were prescient. Doug Ford was working his key donors ahead of the 2018 election, when he promised to open a “big chunk” of the Greenbelt to “some of the country’s biggest developers,” if they helped him win.

Leaked footage showed him telling a room of developers, “Give us property and we’ll build,” signalling if they helped him get elected, he would open large areas of the protected green space for single-family housing. The PC government’s Highway 413 corridor allows the provincial government to do just that.

Since being elected, Ford has pushed through multiple pieces of legislation to fast-track housing and highway development — laws that faced opposition not only from housing and environmental experts, but from his own party as well.

In 2020, a wave of resignations shook Ontario’s Greenbelt Council as seven members, including planners, scientists, environmental experts, and chair David Crombie, a former PC MP and Toronto mayor, stepped down in protest against the Ford government’s proposed legislative changes under Bill 229. 

Crombie described the amendments as a “disastrous assault” on environmental protection, criticizing the use of Ministerial Zoning Orders (MZOs) to override conservation authorities and silence public input.

In March 2021, documents obtained by The Narwhal revealed the Ontario government effectively silenced the Greenbelt Council by changing its rules to make its advice confidential, restricting members’ communication with the media, and requiring that public statements be routed through government channels.

This marked the beginning of a broader trend: the continued erosion of environmental oversight under Ford, culminating in Bill 23, which stripped conservation authorities of key regulatory powers, prohibited them from partnering with municipalities, and forced them to identify lands for potential sale and development, even in ecologically sensitive areas. 

Critics, including Conservation Ontario’s general manager Angela Coleman, warned that removing these safeguards leaves Ontario vulnerable to worsening climate impacts like flooding, erosion, and water contamination.

Bill 23 also significantly reshaped the province’s land use planning system by removing planning responsibilities from several upper-tier municipalities, including Waterloo, Peel, York, Durham, Halton, and Niagara, that could no longer adopt or approve official plans or subdivisions, with those powers shifting to lower-tier municipalities. The province claimed this would streamline development and improve efficiency, but critics argue it fragments coordinated regional planning and gives the Minister more centralized control over approvals.

Bill 23 even led to retired MPP Norm Sterling, who became chair of the Greenbelt Council after David Crombie quit, resigning on October 25, 2022, citing changes to land use laws.

Sterling’s appointment was already controversial from the start, given his tenure as Ontario’s environment minister under former Progressive Conservative Premier Mike Harris in the 1990s. He was minister during the lead-up to the Walkerton tragedy, Canada’s most serious water contamination disaster, which caused seven deaths and thousands of illnesses.

Ford justified Bill 23 and the subsequent legislation as solutions to Ontario’s housing crisis. 

But was it ever about housing?

The province recently updated its housing tracker for the first time in eight months, revealing that Ontario recorded 94,753 total housing starts in 2024, far below the 150,000 starts needed this year to stay on pace with its goal of building 1.5 million homes by 2031.

In 2022, it came to light that developers along the 413 route, who had donated $753,000 to the Ford government, purchased land in or near the Greenbelt and pressured the government to fast-track housing, a matter under Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) investigation since October 2023 after reports by the provincial integrity commissioner and auditor general showed PC officials created a process favouring developers with close party ties.

On September 21, 2023, Ford publicly apologized for breaking his promise to protect the Greenbelt and reversed the decision to remove approximately 3,000 hectares from it. 

But it was a little too late.

On December 14, 2023, Minotar Holdings Inc., the owner of an affected property, filed a constitutional challenge in Ontario’s Divisional Court against the Greenbelt Statute Law Amendment Act, which reinstated protections for 15 parcels of land. 

The developer argues the law prevents judicial review and claims that the government’s retroactive move to void their 2017 settlement agreement is unjust and politically motivated. Minotar, which spent $400,000 on pre-development work, is seeking remedies for the disruption caused by the reversal.

As of late 2024 and early 2025, the case is still in litigation, with taxpayer dollars being spent on the ongoing legal battle.

The RCMP investigation has also been ongoing for over a year, with the results still pending. The findings were expected this spring, but Ford called an early election, seizing the moment to position himself as defending Ontario against Donald Trump.

Doyle says the PCs have instead “proved to be Trump-like in the way they have gutted the civil service, silenced them, suppress them and force them to sign non-disclosure agreements and attestations in relation to the Greenbelt scandal that the government got embroiled in.”

“I’m glad I’m not there anymore. I do my advocacy on the outside now,” he added.

Ahead of the provincial election, The Pointer uncovered a troubling pattern of delays and evasions by the Ford government in response to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests related to the Greenbelt scandal, with multiple requests, particularly those seeking documents on the removal of 15 parcels of protected land, either denied outright or delayed past the February 27 timeline, despite legislation requiring timely public access. 

The Cabinet Office initially indicated it would partially release key documents before reversing course and issuing a full denial, as other requests involving senior officials, including Secretary of Cabinet Michelle DiEmanuele, remained unanswered even when findings from the Auditor General and Integrity Commissioner directly contradicted claims by Ford and former housing minister Steve Clark that they were unaware of the land selections, with internal notes suggesting both had significantly more involvement than acknowledged.

Not only that, Ontario is months behind on its legally required 10-year review of the Greenbelt Plan despite legislation mandating it begin in February. In June, internal documents, obtained by CBC, revealed civil servants had urged municipal affairs and housing minister Rob Flack to launch it immediately after Ford’s third-term win. The process was not formally underway as of late March, and the advisory Greenbelt Council was effectively defunct, staffed by only one member and lacking a chair.

It was rumoured that the government would quietly announce the start of a Greenbelt review sometime in September, beginning with a preliminary consultation on how the process should be conducted, but as of September 25, no announcement had been made.

The Pointer made multiple attempts to obtain a response from the ministry of municipal affairs and housing regarding the status of the Greenbelt review process, but received no reply by the time of publication.

During the first major review of the Greenbelt in 2015, Doyle recalls facing intense political pressure to alter its boundaries. 

Over 800 requests were submitted to remove land, some deep within the Greenbelt, others along its southern edge near rapidly growing cities. Developers often proposed “land swaps,” offering to remove land from the Greenbelt in the south and add land to the north.

“It was just nonsensical,” Doyle said, noting it would erode the Greenbelt’s core purpose.

“If we keep taking land off the bottom and adding to the top, in 100 years the Greenbelt will be in North Bay.” 

In the end, about 340 acres were removed, and 15 of the 800 requests were approved. Doyle described these boundary tweaks as “modest” and “mostly reasonable.” 

“There were a couple of pieces that probably shouldn’t have been removed, but overall, they (Liberals) were strong in protecting it,” he said.

What disappointed Doyle more than the small removals was the missed opportunity to expand the Greenbelt. “We were constrained by geography in the Greenbelt, but the Growth Plan covered a much wider area,” he explained. 

There were plans to grow the Greenbelt into areas like Simcoe and Brant Counties, where development pressures were intensifying, but that effort was halted when the Ford government took power in 2018.

Instead, the new government announced what it called “the biggest Greenbelt expansion ever.” 

“It turned out to be nothing but hot air,” he said, noting the same government was engulfed in controversy over the attempted removal of 7,400 acres in 15 different areas from the Greenbelt shortly after.

Once again, they leaned on the land swap narrative, proposing to compensate for the loss by adding 9,400 acres of lesser conservation value that were already protected by other measures. 

But Doyle saw this for what it was: a revival of the same flawed logic that had been rejected in 2015.

Ontario has had a sprawl problem for a long, long time, and building more highways or pushing development further out hasn’t solved the problem.

Since the 1920s, Ontario has heavily subsidized suburban road building, covering nearly half the cost of construction and a fifth of ongoing maintenance. In the 1940s, Toronto adopted plans for a network of expressways, which included Highways 400, 401, 404, 427, and the Don Valley Parkway, that would carve paths into farmland and forests and open the floodgates for suburban development.

Highway 401 was designed for 35,000 vehicles a day, but within two years of opening, it carried twice that number. Instead of relieving congestion, new highways simply encouraged more commuting, more subdivisions, and more sprawl.

“Ontario’s provincial government continued to build highways into the hinterlands beyond Toronto…Ontario built these highways in order to relieve congestion but their impact on congestion was, at best, unclear,” a 2011 study noted.

In his book The Shape of the Suburbs, former Toronto mayor John Sewell argues that highways didn’t just follow growth, they created it. 

Sewell explained as expressways carved through the countryside, suburbs filled in behind them, fueling sprawl and congestion rather than solving it. By the 1990s, 70 percent of Toronto’s highways were clogged during peak hours. 

Surveys showed that homeowners preferred areas with highway access, proving that sprawl wasn’t inevitable — it was engineered.

The Greenbelt was designed as an antidote to that model.

Sprawl, Doyle argues, “does not pay for itself,” leaving municipalities to shoulder billions in infrastructure and health costs. Compact cities, by contrast, encourage walking, cycling, and transit, which acts as “preventative health care.”

Over the last century, city growth has doubled, disturbing nearly 216,000 square kilometres of intact forests between 2000 and 2013; more than 80 percent of Ontario’s original forests and wetlands have been lost to urbanization, forestry, and industrial development, a World Wildlife Fund report warned.

The province’s farmland is also disappearing. Ontario is losing 319 acres of farmland every day, the equivalent of one average family farm, according to Statistics Canada’s 2021 Census of Agriculture.

Since its inception, the Greenbelt has not only preserved vital natural lands but also contributed significantly to the economy, with its agri-food sector alone generating around $4.1 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) and supporting nearly 59,000 jobs in 2020, according to a 2022 report by the Greenbelt Foundation and the Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance.

Today, Ontario’s Greenbelt generates approximately $9.6 billion in annual economic activity and supports around 177,700 full-time jobs through agriculture, recreation, and tourism, and also delivers $3.2 billion in ecosystem services such as flood protection and water purification, helping reduce infrastructure and healthcare costs for Ontario families.

The Greenbelt also helps reduce carbon emissions by acting as a large-scale carbon sink, where its forests, wetlands, and agricultural soils absorb and store significant amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide through carbon sequestration, capturing approximately 0.55 megatonnes of carbon annually and reducing the net emissions from the area to 4.35 megatonnes per year.

The removal of the land proposed by the Ford government in 2022 would have turned the Greenbelt from a carbon sink into a net source of carbon emissions, releasing the equivalent of the pollution produced by approximately 85,000 gasoline-powered cars over a year, according to a 2024 University of Toronto study.

One of the defining strengths of Ontario’s Greenbelt is that it is not the creation of a single government. It is the product of decades of work by Progressive Conservatives, Liberals, and New Democrats, each adding layers of policy and protection that culminated in the 2005 Greenbelt Plan.

In the 1960s, Progressive Conservative premiers recognized the limits of endless road-building. John Robarts launched early attempts at regional planning, followed by his successor, Bill Davis, who introduced the Parkway Belt West Plan in 1978 to safeguard land for utilities, transit corridors, and green space, creating a buffer against development.

In 1973, the Niagara Escarpment Planning and Development Act was passed “to provide for the maintenance of the Niagara Escarpment. . . and to ensure only such development occurs as is compatible with that natural environment,” leading to Canada’s first large-scale environmental land-use plan.  

By 1985, the Niagara Escarpment Plan introduced land-use designations to protect 195,000 hectares of ecologically and agriculturally significant land, laying critical groundwork for what would later become the Greenbelt. It was later recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1990.

Public concern intensified in the 1990s as sprawling subdivisions threatened the Oak Ridges Moraine, a vital hydrological and ecological corridor. 

Doyle said he was involved in the process when the NDP government under Bob Rae took steps to protect the Oak Ridges Moraine by maintaining the Technical Working Committee and continuing research following the release of the Oak Ridges Moraine Implementation Guidelines in 1991.

Then the Mike Harris’s progressive conservative government came into power in 1995, and “put a lid on everything,” Doyle said.

“But you know what? Sprawl didn’t stop.” 

By the early 2000s, Harris shifted gears, recognizing that unchecked development was unsustainable, and launched the GTA Countryside Strategy along with Smart Growth panels chaired by former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion.

Their three recommendations, including compact urban growth, farmland and water protection, and transit-oriented development, led to the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan in 2002, which protects 469,500 acres of land.

It didn’t come easy. Environmental groups like Ontario Nature (formerly the Federation of Ontario Naturalists) and the Save the Oak Ridges Moraine Coalition launched a powerful campaign to stop development on the moraine. Shaken by mounting public pressure and the political risk of losing ground in a key electoral region, the government responded by passing the Oak Ridges Moraine Protection Act in May 2001, committing to protect the water and natural heritage features of the Moraine. 

By the time Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals came to power in 2003, the pieces were in place for a sweeping regional vision. McGuinty campaigned on creating a Greenbelt that would unify the Moraine, the Niagara Escarpment, and nearly one million acres prime farmland into a single protected zone.

In 2004, Doyle was appointed to lead the initiative, and former Burlington Mayor Rob MacIsaac chaired a Greenbelt Task Force.

He recalls the uphill battle of crafting the Greenbelt Plan as a balancing act between conflicting interests and tough realities. 

“Not everyone was on board,” he noted.

Developers resisted. 

Municipalities worried they would be “shut down” by being locked into protected zones.

Some farmers, Doyle admits, “were vocal because they hoped to sell their land to developers and maybe retire or buy land further north.”

To the municipalities, he said: “Not every municipality gets to be the next Brampton or is meant to be urbanized,” especially given natural constraints and the skyrocketing costs of infrastructure like sewer and water systems.

“Some of the inland watersheds simply cannot accommodate major urbanization.”

To the farmers, he told: “There are no more farms further north. We’ve been growing and chewing up our agricultural land. That day and age had ended.”

He challenged them directly, asking, “Are you a developer or a farmer?” and pointed out that even protected farmland “was still worth a million dollars more than most people realize.” 

In May 2022, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture eventually called for growth inward rather than outward sprawl.

“For decades, farmers have been losing prime farmland to urban sprawl,” Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) former vice president Drew Spoelstra said in a statement.

“OFA believes fixed, permanent urban boundaries will help limit the loss of agricultural land. By redeveloping vacant or underused space, utilizing areas with poor soils or drainage, reinventing existing infrastructure, or building higher density development, we would be able to preserve Ontario’s productive land for food production.”

Boundary-setting was challenging because the Greenbelt was limited to certain regional borders, resulting in straight political lines that sometimes cut through residents’ yards, but Doyle says these compromises were “politics and practicality, not pure science.”

He pointed, “the Greenbelt Act requires us to review the plan every 10 years, so there’s room to fix those oddities over time.” 

Despite all the pushback and tough conversations, Doyle credits the McGuinty government, including the municipal affairs at the time, John Gerretsen, for “bold leadership…not just for today, but for hundreds of years to come.” 

In 2005, the Greenbelt Act was passed and became one of the most ambitious regional land-use protections in North America, protecting 1.8 million acres across southern Ontario, a rare instance of multi-party consensus in Ontario politics.

For Doyle, it has been “very disappointing” to see Ford and the PCs “abandon the legacy of their predecessors and just completely put their blinders on and destroy and dismantle 50 years of progress on sustainable land use planning in Ontario”.

That same year, the province introduced the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe under the Places to Grow Act, which was enacted in 2006 to guide density targets, direct growth inward, and reduce the social, economic, and environmental costs of sprawl.

Doyle says the Greenbelt and the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe were meant to work as “yin and yang”: one protecting farmland and water, the other directing growth inward through higher density, transit investment, and efficient infrastructure.

Little did he know he would have to protect not only his credibility but also the safeguards he spent years building.

In April 2023, the province considered repealing the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, replacing it with the new Provincial Planning Statement. 

At a committee hearing on the change, Doyle warned, “There is no way that 89 lower tiers in the Greater Golden Horseshoe could ever deliver what the upper tiers deliver. They don’t have the capacity, resources or mandates. Replicating these roles through boards and commissions would lead to political unaccountability and lack of coordination.” 

He called on the Ford government to preserve upper-tier planning, keep regional governance intact in key areas, and retain the Growth Plan as the “single integrated policy document” guiding provincial priorities in the region.

The Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe was ultimately repealed in October 2024.

Despite the Growth Plan’s push for more compact development, single-family homes were expected to decline only slightly, from 51 percent of the housing stock to 48 percent by 2031. Apartments would rise from 34 to 35 percent. “We have barely moved the needle,” he wrote in his report, directly contradicting claims that the plans were dramatically reshaping the market or restricting choice.

In 2006, there were over 700,000 owners of ground-related homes aged 55 and older across the Greater Golden Horseshoe. By 2041, nearly all of those homes would return to the market through natural turnover, creating a massive second wave of detached housing supply that had nothing to do with land-use policy, he explained.

The Ministry of Municipal Affairs still claimed Doyle had violated conflict-of-interest rules, and he was stripped of his authority, transferred to a redundant research position, isolated on an empty floor, and cut off from his colleagues and planning tools.

In its October 26 2018 ruling, the Ontario Public Service Grievance Board found no wrongdoing, ethics breach, or conflict of interest, ruling that Doyle had acted within his professional obligations and had been unfairly punished. 

The “independence and impartiality of professional advice is a critical part of the service that citizens have a right to expect from their public servants,” the board confirmed.

In 2006, he had been disciplined for speaking out against the province’s Simcoe Strategy, which encouraged leapfrog sprawl around the Greenbelt. 

“I had fought that case through the Integrity Commissioner and was completely vindicated,” he said.

Back in 2003 and 2004, developers lobbied to have him removed from overseeing growth in Simcoe County because he challenged their plans.

“It was nerve-wracking for me. Personally, I had young kids, and trying to go through whistleblower legislation is not for the faint-hearted, I tell you, and it’s very stressful,” Doyle said. 

“I had an old mentor who told me, ‘Be true to thine self.’ And I guess I was just hopeful that if I followed the rules, that I would be okay.”

One of the biggest threats to the Greenbelt is infrastructure, particularly how it’s being used to justify sprawl. 

When the Growth Plan was created, Doyle said it allowed for “linear infrastructure” to cross the Greenbelt, such as power lines, transit, and highways, but only when such projects clearly connected communities on either side. That principle, he emphasized, was intended to serve regional connectivity, not development interests.

Now, Doyle argues, that provision is being misused to support controversial highway projects like the Bradford Bypass and Highway 413, both of which carve through the Greenbelt. 

“413 is really not connecting anything…The big travel movement isn’t from Simcoe County to Milton. Most of the economic movement is east-west, not north-south,” he said. 

“It’s clear what the motivation is. It’s really to facilitate more sprawl in South Caledon. And the Bradford bypass, again, just connects two highways. It’s not connecting communities on either side, in my view, at least.”

A 2024 EKOS poll commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation shows that 74 percent of Ontarians, rising to 81 percent in Toronto, agree the Greenbelt is no place for new highways. 

Opposition to the proposed Highway 413 from Vaughan to Milton is even stronger, with 81 percent of respondents siding with farmers who oppose the road, including residents of the 905 region, city dwellers, and even many daily car drivers.

In Doyle’s perspective, shaped by decades inside Ontario’s planning system, the Greenbelt was designed to be a permanent safeguard, not a temporary zoning designation subject to political or developer whims. 

Doyle insists the 2025 Greenbelt review must be “evidence-based” and hold the government accountable for its broken promises. 

With the Growth Plan repealed, he warns the Greenbelt is now “the only plan left standing” to protect Ontario’s farmland, natural areas, and water systems. 

“Without the Growth Plan, we need probably a greatly expanded and strengthened Greenbelt Plan,” he says. 

Among his recommendations: “tightening the infrastructure policies,” banning land “swaps,” and allowing only “minor boundary refinements.” 

He calls for a “robust public consultation process led by an objective and interdisciplinary and multi-sectoral panel,” grounded in collaboration with conservation authorities, academics, municipalities, and non-governmental organizations. Doyle emphasizes the process must be transparent, with data publicly available, just as it was in 2015, when research on farmland loss, infrastructure costs, and watershed health showed the Greenbelt was “generally working.” 

Educational outreach by the Greenbelt Foundation has helped build public consensus, which Doyle says leaves governments no excuse to ignore evidence or stage consultations as a “fait accompli.” Rushing through legislation before consultations close, he adds, is “an absolute insult to every citizen in the province.”

For Doyle, civil servants, the media, and the public form a “three-legged stool” for democratic accountability. Remove one leg, and the system topples.

“If people don’t have the information and the media doesn’t get access to it to help disperse it and let people know what’s going on, then governments will get away with whatever they want,” he stressed.

In his 30-year planning career, Doyle spent 25 years at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, starting in 1988, a role he would have continued if not for the Ford government.

“I would have loved to have still been working. I had an amazing career there,” he said.

“In 2017…I was expecting to be let go, but I was at that stage in my career where I could leave without having to worry about my pension being threatened.”

Doyle now spends his days gardening, proud of the ripe raspberries, tomatoes and peppers in his backyard, hiking, exploring natural sites with friends and family, teaching university students about sustainable planning, fearlessly critiquing the government, and advocating for stronger environmental protections.

Email: anushka.yadav@thepointer.com

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