Bill 97 retroactively makes the records the Auditor General called "biased and secret" unobtainable. Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston's MPP voted in favour.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford stands accused of conducting Greenbelt-land negotiations behind closed doors, of using a personal cellphone to keep government business out of official records, and of passing a retroactive freedom-of-information law in April that now shields both from public view.

Each accusation has a named accuser. On the dealmaking, the Auditor General of Ontario in August 2023 and the Integrity Commissioner the same month. On the cellphone, the Information and Privacy Commissioner in November 2024, and the Ontario Divisional Court in December 2025. On the retroactive law, the Information and Privacy Commissioner again in March 2026, joined by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Canadian Association of Journalists, and the official opposition.

The land

On November 4, 2022, the Ford government removed 7,400 acres from 15 parcels of the Ontario Greenbelt, a swath of protected land in the Greater Golden Horseshoe created by Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government in 2005. The government said the removals were needed to meet its target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031. The Auditor General, Bonnie Lysyk, called the selection "biased" and the three-week internal process "secret." She found that 92 percent of the removed acreage came from sites requested by two developers, Silvio De Gasperis of TACC and Michael Rice of the Rice Group, who handed packages to Housing Minister Steve Clark's chief of staff, Ryan Amato, at a Building Industry and Land Development Association dinner on September 14, 2022. Additional parcels were added through a similar back-channel route from a narrow circle of developers including Fieldgate Developments. The next day, Rice spent $80 million on roughly 700 acres in King Township, land that was still inside the Greenbelt at the time of purchase. Lysyk estimated the removals would lift the value of those properties by $8.3 billion. The Integrity Commissioner, J. David Wake, found Clark in breach of the Members' Integrity Act and described Amato as "untrained and unsupervised." Amato resigned in August 2023. Ford initially defended the process. Clark resigned from cabinet on September 4, 2023. Ford reversed the removals on September 21. The Greenbelt Statute Law Amendment Act, restoring the protected status of all 15 parcels, received Royal Assent on December 6, 2023. The RCMP opened a criminal investigation in October 2023. That investigation remains active, with no charges laid and no targets publicly named.

Why this land mattered

The land in question was not needed to meet Ontario's housing target. The Auditor General said so directly. "The government's target to increase housing did not require removing land from the Greenbelt," Lysyk wrote, citing the government's own Housing Affordability Task Force and the Chief Planners of the three affected regions, Durham, Hamilton, and York. The Task Force, chaired by Scotiabank executive Jake Lawrence, had reported in February 2022, nine months before the removal, that "a shortage of land isn't the cause of the problem."

The mainstream supply-side view aligned. Mike Moffatt, then of the Smart Prosperity Institute, said the Task Force "explicitly said we do not need to touch the Greenbelt" and described Bill 23 as "the least efficient, most labour intensive and land intensive way of getting to the 1.5 million mark." Frank Clayton, a senior research fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University's Centre for Urban Research and Land Development, took the opposite view in October 2023, arguing the Auditor General was "incorrect" because shovel-ready land for ground-related housing was in short supply. Clayton's dissent is the principal mainstream academic disagreement on the record. The structural finding holds either way: the same provincial institution that created the Greenbelt protection in 2005 later tried to capture the value uplift its own constraint had generated, on behalf of specific developers, and reversed only after the Auditor General and the Integrity Commissioner reported.

The cover-up

The records of how that decision was made are largely missing. The Information and Privacy Commissioner found in its 2024 annual report a "near-total absence of decision-making documentation" for the Greenbelt file. Government staff used the terms "G*", "GB", and "special project" in place of "Greenbelt" in correspondence; the asterisk in "G*" functioned as a technical wildcard that defeated electronic searches. Premier Ford's government-issued work phone showed no calls during the June-to-November 2022 decision period. The IPC concluded he had used a personal cellphone for government business, and on November 29, 2024, ordered the records released.

The government applied for judicial review. On December 29, 2025, a three-judge panel of the Ontario Divisional Court, Justices Backhouse, Lococo, and Kaufman, dismissed the application and upheld the disclosure order. The IPC's conclusion that Ford had used the personal device for government business was, the court wrote, "a finding of fact that attracts a high degree of deference." The cellphone records had not been produced as of May 2026.

The retroactive law

On March 13, 2026, Government and Consumer Services Minister Stephen Crawford announced amendments to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The amendments became Schedule provisions of Bill 97, the Plan to Protect Ontario Act, 2026, an omnibus budget bill tabled March 27. The amendments exclude all records held by Ministers, Ministers' offices, parliamentary assistants, and the Premier's Office from access requests, and are deemed in force January 1, 1988, the date FIPPA itself first took effect. The clause reaches back 38 years.

Government House Leader Steve Clark, the same Clark whom the Integrity Commissioner had found in breach in 2023, moved on April 17 to cancel the committee hearings. Third reading carried 57 to 33 on April 23. Royal Assent followed the next day.

Within days, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing told The Trillium that 219 records of "investment-opportunity meetings" relating to the Greenbelt would not be released because they fell inside the new exclusion.

Information and Privacy Commissioner Patricia Kosseim, in a statement on March 13, said the message was "plain: if oversight bodies get in the way, just change the rules." In a follow-up on March 25, she noted that of 27,344 provincial access requests in 2024, only about four percent came from journalists; the remainder came from individuals, businesses, researchers, and community groups. An Abacus Data survey commissioned by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, fielded March 20 to 23 with a sample of 1,000, found that 60 percent of Ontarians opposed the changes and 73 percent opposed the retroactive application.

Ford defended the bill by naming "communist Chinese infiltrating our country" as the threat and told reporters he had "nothing to hide." The federal intelligence assessments cited in March 2026 reporting describe Chinese state threat vectors as network intrusion, cyber theft, and insider recruitment. That reporting does not identify freedom-of-information requests as a vector.

The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Canadian Association of Journalists issued a joint statement on May 1 to 2, calling Bill 97 "extraordinary and deeply troubling" and saying they were reviewing options to challenge the law's legality. The retroactivity clause purports to override the December 2025 Divisional Court order for Ford's personal cellphone records and could render academic the IPC subpoena that former chief of staff Ryan Amato had sought to block in a judicial review filed January 9. The constitutional question of whether a statute can reach back into a standing court order remains unadjudicated.

The Frontenac MPP

John Jordan, the Progressive Conservative member for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston, voted AYE on Bill 97 at third reading on April 23. On May 4, 2026, when Liberal MPP Stephanie Smyth moved an opposition day motion to "preserve the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, giving it jurisdiction over ministerial records and private devices," Jordan voted NAY. The motion lost, 31 to 59. Jordan is a Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Health and to the Minister of Long-Term Care, one of the classes of official whose records Bill 97 places outside the access regime. Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston does not contain Greenbelt land; Jordan's role in the file runs entirely through his votes.

The records now shielded include those of Jordan's own office in his capacity as Parliamentary Assistant. Documents held within the Health and Long-Term Care ministries about hospitals, long-term care homes, and primary-care recruitment in Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston now fall inside that exclusion. Voters in the riding seeking to understand how those policy decisions were made about their own communities can no longer request the records that would show it.

Jordan distributes official Ontario government announcements through a Facebook page on which public comments are restricted, a pattern visible to anyone who visits the page. NFNM's separate media-control investigation documents this practice across multiple levels of government, where elected officials route their primary public-facing communication through social-media channels they themselves control, with comments disabled. Right-of-reply letters to Jordan's office and the Premier's Office have been queued for concurrent send at the moment of publication.

Two months before Ford named the People's Republic of China as the rationale for cutting freedom-of-information access, Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Beijing. On January 16, 2026, Carney and Premier Li Qiang signed a joint statement committing the two governments to "advancing the Canada-China new Strategic Partnership in the spirit of mutual respect, equality, and mutual benefit." It was the first visit by a Canadian prime minister to China since 2017. Ford's stated reason for closing 38 years of Ontario records arrived two months after the federal government had reopened the relationship.