EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Recently obtained emails between Premier Doug Ford’s senior staff challenge a pair of claims the government has made about the Greenbelt changes, including when its planning began and to what extent the premier’s office was involved.
A chain of emails, obtained by The Trillium using a freedom of information request, shows Ford’s then-chief of staff told a colleague he’d “check with officials” in November 2021 about a developer’s request to unprotect Greenbelt land to allow for housing to be built.
Action that Jamie Wallace, who ran Ford’s office until a year ago, said he’d take in the email related to land part-owned by Sergio Manchia. The developer’s company has also claimed the premier attended an event at Manchia’s home a couple of months before, where they briefly discussed removing land he owned from the Greenbelt.
While information from two other sources who went to the Sept. 20, 2021 fundraiser also suggests the premier attended, Ford has said he has no recollection of being there.
Land part-owned by Manchia, which Wallace told Patrick Sackville, another longtime staffer in the premier's office, on Nov. 22, 2021, that he’d check in with government officials about was included in the Greenbelt removals the following fall.
The email Wallace forwarded with his comments had been passed along to him by Luca Campagna, a Ford government staffer who was the premier’s executive assistant at the time. Campagna was sent the original email by Scott Beedie, a planner with Urban Solutions.
Manchia, a developer of commercial buildings and homes, ran Urban Solutions at the time. He’s a part owner of land in Hamilton’s east end, near the intersection of Barton Street and Fifty Road, that the Ford government removed from the Greenbelt in late 2022.
“FYI… Hamilton looking at designation change… Will check with officials re any recommendations,” Wallace added in his email to Sackville.
Ford's office didn't respond to questions about the email before the story was published on Tuesday.
“Greenbelt Alteration - Fifty Road Lands, Hamilton” was the subject of Beedie’s Nov. 15, 2021 email to Ford’s then-assistant. In it, Beedie offered justification for why the land should be removed from the Greenbelt, which Hamilton’s municipality had been in favour of for several years, including files in support of the push as well.
One item Beedie mentioned was a recent letter Hamilton’s then-mayor Fred Eisenberger addressed to Steve Clark, housing minister in Ford’s cabinet at the time, in support of the removal of the land from the Greenbelt.
Eisenberger wrote in his Sept. 3, 2021 letter that for necessary developments to be made to the land that the property had to either be removed from the Greenbelt or be redesignated within it.
In his email, Beedie also noted in the email that Manchia, Ford, Eisenberger and others had recently discussed removing the properties from the protected area.
“The parties agreed to pursue the request as it was in keeping with the Province’s objectives of aiding municipalities in providing much-needed housing,” Beedie wrote in the email about a discussion that he said took place on Sept. 20, 2021. 
On Sept. 20, 2021, the date of the discussion Beedie referenced, Ford went to a PC Party fundraiser that Manchia hosted at his home in Ancaster, which The Trillium reported a couple of months ago.
When The Trillium asked Ford at a news conference on Oct. 31, 2023, about the 2021 fundraiser party at Manchia’s, the premier said, “I can’t remember that, but I do talk to thousands of people throughout the year with great ideas.”
Urban Solutions said in an Oct. 31, 2023 statement that the fundraiser Manchia hosted was where he and Ford “spoke briefly” about later-removed Greenbelt land.
“But it was nothing new,” Urban Solutions added in its Oct. 31, 2023 statement. “It was only the latest in a multi-year effort, asking both the previous government and Mr. Ford’s government to rectify what we and Hamilton Council felt was a mistake.”
Key government officials who were interviewed by Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake last year in his investigation into the Greenbelt removals suggested early- to mid-2022 was when the process to go back on Ford’s 2018 promise not to touch the Greenbelt got underway.
“Wallace suggested that the decrease in housing starts (in 2022) may have been an impetus for looking at the Greenbelt,” Wake wrote in the report his office published on Aug. 30.
The Ford government’s 2022 budget, tabled on April 28 of that year, projected an average of 86,900 housing starts a month that year — down from the 99,600-a-month average in 2021.
A few months before, on Feb. 8, 2022, Ontario’s housing affordability task force wrote in a report that the province “must build 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years to address the supply shortage.” The Ford government adopted that target, only for the housing starts it’d project in its 2022 budget to show that it was on track to fall significantly short of its goal.
“(Wallace) said that in early 2022 when it was announced that housing starts had decreased to approximately 86,000, there was a conversation in the Premier’s Office about needing to look at options to address the problem,” the integrity commissioner’s report said. “These were held with Amin Massoudi … and Andrew Sidnell.”
Sidnell and Massoudi were each high-ranking colleagues of Wallace’s in Ford’s office at the time. In interviewing with Wake, Sidnell said he “likely” discussed potential Greenbelt changes before the last election with Jae Truesdell, who was Ford’s housing policy director, but couldn’t recall talking about it with anyone else before then; Massoudi, meanwhile, “did not recall it being discussed again until after the 2022 election,” the integrity commissioner’s report said.
As Wake’s report adds, Truesdell also said he and a pair of colleagues from the premier’s office’s policy team included the idea of coming up with “a process and criteria for considering removals and additions to the Greenbelt, with the goal of increasing the housing supply” in preparatory work for ministers’ mandate letters that they did during the 2022 election campaign.
Sackville, who Wallace sent the Nov. 22, 2021 email to, was part of Ford’s policy team until September 2022. He’s now the premier’s chief of staff, taking over from Wallace about a year ago. Each of them along with Sidnell, Massoudi, and Truesdell were among the 20 political staff who had access to the drafts and final versions of the post-2022 election mandate letters before Ford assigned them on June 29 of that year, according to the integrity commissioner’s report.
On that date, the mandate letter the premier gave to Clark, the housing minister at the time, instructed him to “complete work to codify processes for swaps, expansions, contractions and policy updates for the Greenbelt” in fall 2022, setting the stage for the land swap.
The premier told Ontario’s integrity commissioner that he wasn’t involved in selecting specific lands to remove from the Greenbelt, which he’s maintained since. Premier’s office staff also told the integrity commissioner they weren’t involved in selecting which specific properties to remove.
Clark’s former chief of staff, Ryan Amato, oversaw and largely directed the site-selection process, in many cases following requests that came directly from developers, the auditor general and the integrity commissioner each wrote in their reports.
In total, the Ford government removed 7,400 acres of land across 15 different sites from the Greenbelt, with its intent being for 50,000 new homes to be built on the previously undevelopable properties. Ontario’s former auditor general estimated in her Aug. 9 Greenbelt report that developers owning the land stood to make upwards of $8.3 billion, thanks to increases in their lands’ values.
Land at the Hamilton site that Manchia was part-owner of included just 10 acres. According to both the integrity commissioner and auditor general, Housing Ministry staff were alerted to this site by Amato, who received certain information about it from his deputy, Kirsten Jensen, who was given it by Manchia’s business partner Matt Johnston in the fall of 2022.
Amato and Manchia each told the integrity commissioner that they discussed the site with each other in the weeks leading up to when the Greenbelt changes were proposed on Nov. 4, 2022. The specifics that each of them, along with Jensen and Johnston, separately recalled to Wake about how their discussions during the fall of 2022 led to the land being involved in the Greenbelt land swap sometimes contrasted with one another’s, or with other information that the commissioner gathered.
For example, text messages between Amato and Jensen that were included in Wake’s report show the chief of staff said to his deputy on Aug. 1, 2022, “the premier needs to stop calling this guy,” referring to Manchia.
In later explaining to the integrity commissioner what he meant in his text, Amato said the “text is inaccurate” because “it should be the other way around … Sergio, to my understanding, will call the Premier from time to time,” and that he wasn’t aware of any specific times Manchia called Ford.
Meanwhile, Ford “was not immediately familiar with Mr. Manchia,” Wake’s Aug. 30 report said, while the developer said he’d met Ford “about six times,” including at the Sept. 20, 2021 PC Party fundraiser he hosted.
Manchia was also one of two developers involved in the Greenbelt land swap who purchased tickets to the Aug. 11, 2022 fundraiser Ford hosted ahead of his daughter’s wedding. Manchia didn’t attend, however, giving one ticket to Johnston, who said he “briefly” spoke to Ford at the event, according to Wake’s report.
On Sept. 21, 2023, a month-and-a-half after the auditor general’s report began the escalation of the Greenbelt scandal, Ford apologized for the land removals and promised to reverse them. PC MPPs passed a bill completing the walkback on Dec. 5.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been investigating whether there was a criminal element behind the Ford government’s 2022 Greenbelt changes since late last year.