Kicking the can even further down the road.

In 2018, the Premier was caught on video in a backroom promising land speculators that he was going to open up the greenbelt, and then he backed away. He said, “Oh, they don’t want me to touch the greenbelt. We won’t touch the greenbelt.”

Now we know that before the 2022 election, senior staff in the Premier’s office were discussing removing lands from the greenbelt. They knew it would be unpopular, so they went to great lengths and spent untold amounts of taxpayer dollars on lawyers to keep their mandate letters secret. This Premier knew what he was hiding.

Why did the Premier keep his plans to remove lands from the greenbelt a secret from voters?

Back to the Premier: It wasn’t just the mandate letters they attempted to keep under wraps. The government forced non-political public servants working on the greenbelt project to sign non-disclosure agreements, NDAs. Ministry officials described special steps they took throughout the project, including not using email and instead using Microsoft Teams to share documents.

Why did the Premier go to such extreme lengths to keep his change in government policy a secret?

Well, let’s talk about emails. It seems that a powerful bad apple can spoil the bunch. The Auditor General found that, contrary to the freedom-of-information laws and cyber security guidelines, Conservative staff were regularly using their personal email accounts to communicate with lobbyists. It’s right here. Not only that, but emails were also regularly being deleted.

Back to the Premier again: Did government staff, staff in the Premier’s office, or the Premier himself delete any emails or documents that are relevant to their decision to remove lands from the greenbelt?

Back to the Premier again: Why did your staff delete emails?

Let’s follow along—page 6 of the Integrity Commissioner’s report. The Premier’s chief of staff hand-selects every minister’s chief of staff. They gave Ryan Amato, an inexperienced, untrained staffer, one of the biggest files in government. And the Integrity Commissioner found that he led a “chaotic and almost reckless process” that “led to an uninformed and opaque decision which resulted in the creation of an opportunity to further the private interests of some developers improperly”—in the words of the Integrity Commissioner, page 6.

To the Premier: How are we supposed to believe that Amato alone rigged the whole system when the Premier’s hands are all over this?

Interjections.