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Breaking: There’s No One More Corrupt Than Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

Oct 31, 2023

Political corruption in Canada is in a provincial horse race.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has given hundreds of millions to friends for everything from fake Turkish Tylenol to stealing your pension to pay off her Oil and Gas donors.

Sask Premier Scott Moe just banned the Canadian flag and made it illegal for trans/LGBTQ children to tell their teachers about the physical abuse they suffer at the hands of abusive parents.

But Ontario Premier Doug Ford is the clubhouse leader in a race to the fucking bottom.

There is no one more corrupt, more power-hungry, or more vindictive than Doug Ford (and his conservative government).

Aside from telling the police to stand down during the freedom convoy, gifting Ontario Place to Turkish casino owners who bought his label company in return, having his security beat nurses at rallies, stealing billions in federal COVID funding, killing 12k seniors in privatized LTC homes, and gifting $8.3 billion to his donor/developer friends, Doug is now in the barrel for being directly connected to enriching his friends, again. While in the middle of being investigated by the RCMP for the same thing.

My guy Frank Domenic has the details:

The RCMP doesn’t open international criminal investigations into governments for shits and giggles. International money has POURED into Ontario over the last three years. The way to launder money if you’re a foreign national is through real estate.

Doug has tried for months to tell us that A) he had no idea the same donors/friends at his daughter’s wedding weren’t the only developers who benefitted from the #GreenBelt giveaway, and B) all that theft and collusion was everyone else’s fault.

Today, we found out every developer/donor given BILLIONS in the now canceled #GreenbeltScam was at his daughter’s stag and doe and her wedding. He used it to hide payoffs in plain sight, according to some. Optically, it doesn’t matter because we can now officially say that Doug Ford secretly colluded with these same developers and donors to do their bidding: Give them the land they wanted in return for their ongoing support while pretending he never met them and had no idea how the process worked. Today, after a MASSIVE FOI dump, we have close to 7k pages of documents, including handwritten notes by Ford staffers detailing how involved he was. And he directed all of it.

CBC: Ontario Premier Doug Ford met face-to-face with Hamilton developer Sergio Manchia about removing his land from the Greenbelt in 2021, documents reveal.

The documents contradict what Ford has previously said about his involvement in the controversy, including he has “no recollection” of meeting Manchia, nor did he know about the proposed changes before 2022.

The meeting took place more than a year before Ford’s government publicly announced its plan to allow select developers to build on the protected Greenbelt, according to an email released Monday among thousands of pages of documents obtained by Environmental Defence through a Freedom of Information request. 

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss opening up Manchia’s Greenbelt land at Barton Street and Fifty Road for development, according to an email to Ford’s executive assistant from Scott Beedie, a planner at Manchia’s company UrbanSolutions. 

“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. 

Also at the Sept. 20, 2021, meeting was then Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger, PC MPP Donna Skelly and LiUNA vice-president Joseph Mancinelli, according to the email.

LiUNA spokesperson Victoria Mancinelli said her father never attended such a “private meeting” and has no involvement in this land. 

Ford’s spokesperson, Caitlin Clark, said changes to the Greenbelt were considered only after the 2022 provincial election.

“Neither the premier or the premier’s office was part of any specific site selection,” Clark said in an email. “This particular proposal for removal had long-standing support from the local municipality, including a letter from the then mayor of Hamilton as well as a council resolution.”

The integrity commissioner found earlier this year that Manchia, who lives in Ancaster, had hosted a fundraiser for Skelly in September 2021 with about 50 to 70 people in attendance, including Ford.

  • Manchia has met Ford at several other events in recent years, and bought four tickets to his daughter’s stag-and-doe, which he handed off to one of his planners Matt Johnston, the integrity commissioner found. 

  • Johnston told CBC Hamilton on behalf of Manchia that it was “no secret” he had been calling for his property to be removed from the Greenbelt for years.

  • The meeting in September 2021 “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,” Johnston said.

  • Ford has denied having close ties to Manchia. He told the integrity commissioner “he had no recollection of meeting him, having any telephone or other conversations with him about the Greenbelt or communicating to any staff about Mr. Manchia.”

  • He has also told reporters he never directed staff on what lands to remove from the Greenbelt and he only became aware of what they were proposing when it was presented to his cabinet in November 2022, just before it was publicly announced.

  • In the email to Ford’s assistant, Beedie noted Manchia had the support of Hamilton’s chief planner and the mayor to allow development of 200 homes on the four acres. The site is also close to other housing subdivisions and a school, and is connected to city infrastructure.

  • A year later, the Ford government removed Manchia’s land from the Greenbelt, along with 14 other sites across the Greater Hamilton and Toronto area. Facing intense scrutiny and an RCMP investigation, the province re-added all the sites back to the Greenbelt. They currently cannot be developed.

  • Manchia has benefited from other land changes by the Ford government. His land near Hamilton’s airport was added to the urban boundary, opening it up for development.

  • The province also copied, word for word, Johnston’s requests to change Hamilton’s official plan to allow Manchia to build a condo building on a heritage site in Ancaster.

Doug Ford was more than personally involved in meetings. He was the centerpiece of the scam. The driver. The one with the most to gain.

It says so in meeting notes from the meetings. Ford says he was never at (he was), and stag and doe the same developers never went to (they all did).

Video: Doug Ford’s Backyard Stag and Doe With A Few Developer Friends Looked Lovely, And Totally Problematic

A month ago, housing minister aid Ryan Amato was to blame. It turns out Ryan Amato took his direction from Ford, according to…Ryan Amato. We only know this because half of Doug Ford’s cabinet is leaking this information, and an environmental group successfully got access to meeting notes (Ford tried for years to bury them) from the corrupt process of the Government using 110 MZOs (ministerial orders) to bypass environmental studies and zoning laws – in secret.

Today, Fordsie was asked if he lied about not having anything to do with the Greenbelt scam in light of Amato’s notes that the Premier was driving the entire process, and he could only say, “They cleared my office.”

“They” didn’t. The AG and IC both called his process, and the people involved corrupt.

Doug’s been hiding for the past 40 days. He came out this morning to announce the extension of a tax cut on gas in an attempt to blow angry Ontarians into forgetting about his corruption and his government’s theft of BILLIONS of your tax dollars. The Q and A was a lesson in how dumb fucks like Ford pretend their house isn’t on fire.

He started by shitting his size 52 suit pants…

He then answered specific questions with quips about Halloween, interest rates, Olivia Chow, and tech, something, something.

Then he took a swipe at the media (he hates media who ask legit questions about his clear corruption receipts), including Colin D’Melo, who he threatened two months ago.

The dude is ON THE RUN. From the truth. From the RCMP. From developers. From Ontarians and now, from the media that turned on him like we all knew they would.

Except for the Toronto Sun. They’re just as corrupt as he is, so they’re pot-committed.

#DougFor4Jail!!!

DB

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dean Blundell

Dean Blundell is a Canadian radio personality. Best known as a longtime morning host on CFNY-FM (The Edge) in Toronto, Ontario. In 2015 he was named the new morning host on sports radio station CJCL (Sportsnet 590 The Fan). Dean started his career in radio in 2001 and for nearly 20 years been entertaining the radio audience. Dean’s newest venture is the launch of his site and podcast which is gaining tremendous momentum across North America.

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