The Ontario Liberals are asking the integrity commissioner to investigate the province’s decision to backtrack on an environmental assessment of a massive landfill expansion project backed by Progressive Conservative donors.
The Liberals want the integrity commissioner to look at whether Premier Doug Ford’s government gave the project special treatment because its developers are lucrative donors to his party.
The government is opting to cancel the assessment it had previously ordered for the project in Dresden, a rural farming community in southwestern Ontario, as part of a controversial omnibus bill making its way through the legislature.
The government ordered the assessment last summer, citing the community’s concerns about the proposed landfill expansion, just weeks before it called a byelection in the local riding where the PC candidate campaigned against the expansion.
Environment Minister Todd McCarthy now says the province can’t afford to keep shipping a large share of its waste to the United States, suggesting Ontario is facing a landfill capacity “crisis.”
The Liberals fired back by suggesting the government was leveraging the U.S. trade war to push through policies to benefit insiders at the expense of transparency and accountability to local residents.
York1, the company behind the project, is seeking to revive a dormant landfill about a kilometre north of Dresden and expand it by more than 30-fold to service waste from across the province.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Details of the developers’ donations and lobbying efforts were first reported by The Trillium, a Queen’s Park-based news outlet, and were cited by the Liberals in their letter to the integrity commissioner.
The Trillium reported executives at the companies and their family members had donated about $200,000 to the PCs since 2018.
The Canadian Press has corroborated some of those political contributions recorded in a public Elections Ontario database.
The integrity commissioner confirmed it was reviewing the Liberal request.