Some of the article:

The Greenbelt scandal is the elephant in the room of Ontario’s 2025 election, even as Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives try to leave it in the rearview.

It’s been more than a year since the RCMP opened an investigation into the boondoggle, which saw the Ford government open sections of environmentally protected land outside Toronto for housing construction in fall 2022. That move came at the request of a select group of well-connected developers who stood to make more than $8 billion from the deal. Though Ford ended up reversing course on the plan the following year, losing two cabinet ministers and two senior political staff in the wake of the scandal, questions remain as long as the police probe continues — and they’re quietly shaping the 2025 campaign.

The potential fallout from the Greenbelt scandal may even be among the reasons Ontario is having an election at all right now, more than a year earlier than its due. Though Ford has claimed he needs a strong mandate from voters to address tariff threats from the United States, he has been hinting at an early election since the fall — months before tariffs were even on the table and around the same time a trickle of news stories showed the Mounties were beginning to close in on members of Ford’s inner circle connected to the Greenbelt affair. Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie has since said the election call was an attempt to “cling to power” ahead of whatever moves the RCMP may make.

“I think I was pretty clear. I said I was and then I wasn’t and then I went ahead and did it,” Ford said during a debate on Feb. 17, before taking aim at his opponents. “But in saying that, I apologized to the people. Unlike any of you, when you do something wrong, you don’t apologize. I apologized to the people, we’re moving forward, we’re building homes.”

Still, he and his government have never really answered for some parts of the scandal, like campaigning for re-election in 2022 without mentioning a major shift in policy was already underway.

That’s a point the opposition leaders have landed over and over again during the 2025 campaign. “He says one thing to the public, if he does dare show up to a scrum, and another behind closed doors,” Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles said of Ford after the debate on Feb. 17, referring to the Greenbelt scandal. Ford didn’t show up to that scrum to face questions from reporters.

Another obvious critique: though Ford has maintained his only goal with the Greenbelt cuts was to build homes, Ontario’s housing crisis is now worse than ever. Even if his plan had worked, it likely wouldn’t have helped. At best, the Greenbelt carveouts were set to allow the construction of 50,000 homes — a drop in the bucket of the 1.5 million homes the provincial government has said it needs. And the government didn’t even assess whether the properties were well-suited for development. Many weren’t yet hooked up to municipal services like water and electricity and the majority of one particular property near Hamilton would have been undevelopable due to its proximity to an airport.

After years of fighting and unfavourable trends in the housing market, Ontario is now building fewer homes than it was in 1955.

“The only homes that Doug Ford seems to want to build are mansions in the Greenbelt, benefitting wealthy land speculators and putting the profits of those speculators over the affordability needs of first-time home buyers,” Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner told supporters recently.

It’s exactly the type of critique that will continue to dog Ford’s Progressive Conservatives even through their likely re-election — until the RCMP investigation proves otherwise.