ALBERTA

Braid: Old-fashioned government incompetence wrecked a working lab-test system

Author of the article:

Don Braid  •  Calgary Herald

Published Sep 08, 2023  •  

Adriana LaGrange, Alberta minister of health, speaks at the Peter Lougheed Centre on Tuesday, Aug. 22. PHOTO BY AZIN GHAFFARI /Postmedia

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What a mess. The DynaLife lab testing fiasco stands as one of the worst Alberta government blunders in many years.

It was driven by political pressures, AHS imperialism, a rushed contract that never should have been signed and costs yet to be revealed.

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On Aug. 18, the UCP government and DynaLife parted ways after wait times for blood and other tests ran out of control in Calgary.

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DynaLife had done reliable lab testing in Edmonton and the north for many years. Suddenly it lost the whole province, not just the troubled south.

It’s not clear if DynaLife voluntarily decided to quit Alberta, or if the UCP pushed the company out. Lawsuits may yet emerge from this.

The government has provided no details of the original contract that disastrously extended private testing, or the cost of ending the agreement.

The NDP has asked provincial auditor general Doug Wylie to investigate. The auditor’s office says no decision has been made yet. If any current problem deserves urgent inquiry and disclosure, this is surely it.

New Health Minister Adriana LaGrange looked deeply uncomfortable on the August Friday afternoon as she tried to paint this move as an improvement in health care.

The truth is that the government, already facing so many health-care pressures in hospitals, family medicine and surgeries, virtually wrecked a public testing system that was working very well.

After the southern shift took formal effect on Feb. 23, wait times began growing in Calgary. They soon stretched to weeks for an online appointment, and then to months.

Clinics were swamped by walk-ins. People with appointments they booked far ahead often had to wait hours after they arrived at a clinic.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith speaks at a press conference in McDougall Centre in Calgary on Monday, Aug. 14. PHOTO BY AZIN GHAFFARI /Postmedia

Doctors were alarmed. Many had patients with serious conditions that needed prompt diagnosis.

Lab technicians, who had no part in causing this, came under intense pressure and occasional abuse.

And it was all unnecessary. Testing under Alberta Precision Laboratories (APL) had been one area that seemed to work reliably in the south. DynaLife was still doing fine in Edmonton.

In near panic, the government threw resources at the problem, or said it did, shifting some community testing to the remaining APL labs in hospitals and urgent-care centres.

None of that had much effect. Then came the dramatic August cancellation that’s supposed to bring improvement.

It hasn’t — at least, not yet. The booking website (albertaprecisionlabs.ca) shows that wait times might have improved slightly, but can still be very long.

Edmonton, meanwhile, is still fairly well served.

Even in government, people were shocked at the dramatic move to end all dealings with DynaLife.

The new contract had been announced late last year — after Premier Danielle Smith took office — and painted in February as a money-saving move that would be more efficient.

People close to the matter say the original contract had to be deeply flawed. One obvious problem was that lab technicians, suddenly in the private sector, took a drop in pay. This was sure to cause trouble.

Dynalife might have expected adjustments to get funding for problems that arose.

But a new regime was in place. Smith’s crew may have taken a tougher attitude to the contract and resisted pressure for new funding.

Jason Copping, the health minister who announced the change, lost in the May 29 election. So did Tyler Shandro, the former minister who was involved earlier.

Former Alberta minister of health Jason Copping, centre, tours Alberta Precision Laboratories in Calgary with Dr. Dylan Pillai, South Sector Medical Director, Alberta Precision Laboratories, right and Jason Pincock, president and CEO, DynaLIFE Medical Labs on Thursday, June 2, 2022. Gavin Young/Postmedia

Jason Kenney, premier at the time the drive began, was long gone.

Another player was AHS, many of whose executives were against private community testing, and still are. They want a provincewide public system. Now they have it, in the most bizarre circumstances.

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Smith says all this took shape before she took office. But she was premier for ore than three months before the system kicked in.

A bad deal could and should have been killed before it saw the light of day. There’s plenty of blame to go around here.

AHS seems to be the winner in the background tussle for a public provincial system, but that may only be temporary.

There’s talk that the UCP will at some point move once again toward provincewide private lab testing.

Many people will blame privatization for this debacle, but the main villain seems to be old-fashioned incompetence.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald.

Regulator yanks thousands of wells from troubled oil company, transfers for cleanup

OIL COMPANY LOSES WELLS

The Canadian Press - Sep 8, 2023 / 11:30 am | Story: 445701

Photo: The Canadian Press

A de-commissioned pumpjack is shown at a well head on an oil and gas installation near Cremona, Alta.

Alberta's energy regulator has transferred thousands of oil and gas wells and other facilities held by a troubled Calgary company to the group that's responsible for cleaning up poorly maintained or abandoned sites.

In an order issued Monday, the regulator has told AlphaBow Energy that it is no longer allowed on the sites it owns and has transferred control to the Orphan Well Association.

Regulatory documents show more than 3,000 wells, 2,700 pipeline segments and 350 facilities are affected.

Those documents suggest that AlphaBow's environmental liability totals $154 million.

Lars DePauw of the Orphan Well Association says staff are visiting the sites to determine what work needs to be done to ensure they are safe.

Documents issued by the regulator detail a long list of problems, with fewer than half of field checks on the company rated satisfactory.

Evolution of Vertebrate Armor: How Fish Evolved Their Protective Bony Scales

By CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (CALTECH) SEPTEMBER 9, 2023

Dorsal scutes of sterlet sturgeon. A recent study discovered that a specific type of stem cell, the trunk neural crest cell, is responsible for the development of bony protective scales (scutes) in fish. This breakthrough reveals how our soft-bodied evolutionary ancestors developed protective armor, paving the way for the evolution of a multitude of vertebrate species. Credit: Courtesy of J. Stundl

A Caltech study identified trunk neural crest cells as the origin of protective bony scales in fish, shedding light on the evolution of vertebrate armor.

About 350 million years ago, your evolutionary ancestors—and the ancestors of all modern vertebrates—were merely soft-bodied animals living in the oceans. In order to survive and evolve to become what we are today, these animals needed to gain some protection and advantage over the ocean’s predators, which were then dominated by crustaceans.

The evolution of dermal armor, like the sharp spines found on an armored catfish or the bony diamond-shaped scales, called scutes, covering a sturgeon, was a successful strategy. Thousands of species of fish utilized varying patterns of dermal armor, composed of bone and/or a substance called dentine, an important component of modern human teeth. Protective coatings like these helped vertebrates survive and evolve further into new animals and ultimately humans.

But where did this armor come from? How did our ancient underwater ancestors evolve to grow this protective coat?

Now, using sturgeon fish, a new study finds that a specific population of stem cells, called trunk neural crest cells, are responsible for the development of bony scutes in fish. The work was conducted by Jan Stundl, now a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Marianne Bronner, the Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology and director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech. A paper describing the research was published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Jan Stundl holds a sturgeon fish in the laboratory. Credit: Courtesy of J. Stund

The Bronner laboratory has long been interested in studying neural crest cells. Found in all vertebrates including fish, chickens, and ourselves, these cells become specialized based on whether they arise from the head (cranial) or spinal cord (trunk) regions. Both cranial and trunk neural crest cells migrate from their starting points throughout the animal’s developing body, giving rise to the cells that make up the jaws, heart, and other important structures. After a 2017 study from the University of Cambridge showed that trunk neural crest cells give rise to dentine-based dermal armor in a type of fish called the little skate, Stundl and his colleagues hypothesized that the same population of cells might also give rise to bone-based armor in vertebrates broadly.

A reconstruction of a single sturgeon scute, close up. Bone-forming cells are marked in magenta. Credit: Courtesy of J. Stundl

To study this, Stundl and the team turned to the sturgeon fish, specifically the sterlet sturgeon (Acipenser ruthenus). Modern sturgeons, best known for their production of the world’s most expensive caviar, still have many of the same characteristics as their ancestors from millions of years ago. This makes them prime candidates for evolutionary studies.

Using sturgeon embryos grown at the Research Institute of Fish Culture and Hydrobiology in the Czech Republic, Stundl and his team used fluorescent dye to track how the fish’s trunk neural crest cells migrated throughout its developing body. Sturgeons begin to develop their bony scutes after a couple of weeks, so the researchers kept the growing fish in a darkened lab in order to not disturb the fluorescent dye with light.

The team found fluorescently labeled trunk neural crest cells in the exact locations where the sturgeon’s bony scutes were forming. They then used a different technique to highlight the fish’s osteoblasts, a type of cell that forms bone. Genetic signatures associated with osteoblast differentiation were found in the fluorescent cells in the fish’s developing scutes, providing strong evidence that the trunk neural crest cells do in fact give rise to bone-forming cells. Combined with the 2017 findings about neural crest cells’ role in forming dentine-based armor, the work shows that trunk neural crest cells are indeed responsible for giving rise to the bony dermal armor that enabled the evolutionary success of vertebrate fish.

“Working with non-model organisms is tricky; the tools that exist in standard lab organisms like mouse or zebrafish either do not work or need to be significantly adapted,” says Stundl. “Despite these challenges, information from non-model organisms like sturgeon allows us to answer fundamental evolutionary developmental biology questions in a rigorous manner.”

“By studying many animals on the Tree of Life, we can infer what evolutionary events have taken place,” says Bronner. “This is particularly powerful if we can approach evolutionary questions from a developmental biology perspective, since many changes that led to diverse cell types occurred via small alterations in embryonic development. We were very fortunate to receive funding from Caltech’s Center for Evolutionary Sciences, which helped us make studies of this sort possible.”

Caltech’s Center for Evolutionary Science (CES) is an Institute-wide, multi-division organization that recognizes and supports the investigation of evolutionary change in the natural world via both biotic and anthropogenic forces.

“Evolution is a central theme that runs through all of biology; it unifies our discipline,” says Joe Parker, Assistant Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering, Chen Scholar, and co-director of the CES. “Caltech is an incredible place with so many groups pursuing evolutionary problems in different contexts, including at the interface of evolution and development biology—as this study so beautifully shows.”

The paper is titled “Ancient vertebrate dermal armor evolved from trunk neural crest” by Jan Stundl, Megan L. Martik, Donglei Chen, Desingu Ayyappa Raja, Roman Franěk, Anna Pospisilova, Martin Pšenička, Brian D. Metscher, Ingo Braasch, Tatjana Haitina, Robert Cerny, Per E. Ahlberg and Marianne E. Bronner, 17 July 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2221120120

In addition to Bronner and Stundl, Caltech co-authors are former postdoctoral scholar Megan Martik, now at the University of California Berkeley, and postdoctoral scholar Desingu Ayyappa Raja. Additional co-authors are Donglei Chen, Tatjana Haitina, and Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden; Roman Franěk and Martin Pšenička of the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic; Anna Pospisilova and Robert Cerny of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic; Brian Metscher of the University of Vienna in Austria; and Ingo Braasch of Michigan State University. Funding was provided by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program; the National Institutes of Health; a Wallenberg Scholarship from the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation; the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation; the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic; the Czech Science Foundation; and the National Science Foundation.

Bronner and Parker are affiliated faculty members with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.

It’s reassuring to think humans are evolution’s ultimate destination – but research shows we may be an accident

The Cambrian explosion, about 530 million years ago, was when most of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. 

THE CONVERSATION
Published: September 5, 2023 

dia CommonsDepending upon how you do the counting, there are around 9 million species on Earth, from the simplest single-celled organisms to humans.

It’s reassuring to imagine that complex bodies and brains like ours are the inevitable consequence of evolution, as if evolution had a goal. Unfortunately for human egos, a recent study comparing over a thousand mammals – the group we belong to – painted a less gratifying picture.

Evolutionary biologists in the late 18th century, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, reasoned that life must have an innate tendency to evolve into ever more complex forms, and

believed this reflected God’s design. However, by the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin showed that natural selection has no direction, and will sometimes make organisms simpler.

Modern biologists agree that the most complex organisms have become more complex over the last 4 billion years, but they disagree about what sort of process accounts for this.

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Because most organisms are still very simple, one possibility is that maximum complexity has increased “accidentally”, like the diffusion of a drop of ink in a glass of water. If true, this could be a blow to our human sense of significance as the most complex organisms.

Another theory is that increasing complexity is driven, on average, by natural selection. Sometimes selection acts on many, independent branches of the tree of life in a similar way and in parallel. This can produce similar effects in many of those branches and is known as a driven trend.

While driven trends need not imply divine purpose, they at least suggest that complexity was mostly an improvement, which is reassuring for us humans.

So which pattern is the most common in the evolution of complexity: accidental diffusion or driven trend?

Most changes and mutations are bad, and these variants are usually weeded out through a process called stabilising selection, which acts to maintain the status quo. But if most mutations make things function less well, doesn’t this make it very difficult for evolutionary novelties to arise?

In fact, evolution often operates on multiple copies of things. For example, a single gene might be duplicated within the same organism.

Provided one copy maintains its original function, the other copy can accumulate mutations without putting its bearer at an immediate disadvantage. These mutated copies are usually edited out over time, but occasionally they acquire a new function that gives an advantage.

Even more remarkably, whole genomes – every single gene in an organism – can be duplicated in one generation. Under these circumstances, there are many chances that copies of some genes will acquire a new function.

For example, sturgeons and paddle fishes underwent a whole genome duplication 250 million years ago, and this may explain how they survived the biggest ever mass extinction that wiped out 96% of other marine species.

Millipedes have lots of pairs of legs that are essentially identical. Shrimps have fewer pairs of legs but with many different functions. 

photochem_PA/Alexander Semenov, CC BY-NC-SA

Identical copies of structures such as segments and limbs can also be made via duplication processes. For example, millipedes have lots of legs, but they are the same design copied lots of times.

Shrimps, by contrast have many different types of legs modified for feeding, walking, swimming and brooding eggs. A biological principle called the zero force evolutionary law states that these copies will tend to become less similar by accidental diffusion alone, unless stabilising selection acts to keep the status quo. Of course, natural selection may also act to make the copies less similar if this has an advantage.

Our paper shows that increasing complexity in mammals has both diffusive and driven aspects. Rather than marching towards greater complexity, mammals evolved in lots of different directions, with only some lineages pushing the upper bounds of complexity.

The spine of the domestic cat has several different types of vertebrae doing different jobs. Kirill Tsukanov/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Surely nature selects for complexity just a bit?

Unfortunately, there is little research addressing this question. One of the few published studies demonstrates that crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, shrimps and their relatives) evolved with a driven trend for increasing complexity over the last half a billion years.

Like crustaceans, and all vertebrates, we have bodies made of repeating blocks of tissue (called somites). These are most visible in our vertebral column (or spine) and ribs, and in the six-pack of a lean athlete. Across mammals, the number of vertebrae (the bones that make up the spine) varies and they are shaped to do different jobs in the neck, thorax, back, sacrum and tail.

Counting the number of bones in different regions can quantify one aspect of complexity across all mammals. In our study sampling over a thousand mammal species, many groups – including whales, bats, rodents, carnivores and, our own group, the primates – independently evolved complex vertebral columns. This suggests higher complexity can be a winning formula, and that selection is driving this in multiple branches of the mammal tree.

However, many other branches have a low plateau in complexity or even become simpler. Elephants, rhinos, sloths, manatees, armadillos, golden moles and platypuses all thrived despite the fact they have relatively simple vertebral columns. The direction of evolution all depends on context.

 

In a study of 1,136 mammal species, we find a driven trend for increasing complexity in multiple parallel lineages. Left hand panel is the number of vertebrae. Right hand panel is our index of complexity. Blue lines are lower values, while red lines are higher values. Li et al; Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023), CC BY-ND

Research into the evolution of complexity has only recently started gathering pace, so there is much we still don’t know. But we do know that the story of mammalian evolution hasn’t been a directional “march of progress”, but rather has many characteristics of a random and diffusive walk.

Authors

Matthew Wills
Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath

Marcello Ruta
Senior Lecturer, Life Sciences, University of Lincoln

Disclosure statement

Matthew Wills receives funding from BBSRC, NERC, The Leverhulme Trust and The John Templeton Foundation

Marcello Ruta receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation
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BOSSES LAWYER

Howard Levitt: The CRA has closed a loophole that will transform severance settlements

Wrongful dismissal cases in Canada have just become more difficult to settle

Author of the article:Howard Levitt
Published Sep 08, 2023 

The Canada Revenue Agency headquarters' Connaught Building in Ottawa. 

PHOTO BY SEAN KILPATRICK/THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES

There is a dirty little secret as to how employment law cases get settled. But it is coming to an end — this column will hasten its demise.


THIS IS A SLANDER AGAINST LABOUR UNIONS AND LABOUR LAWYERS
Employee lawyers constantly make vicious claims on behalf of their clients

about age discrimination, racial discrimination, fraudulent practices, toxic work environments — even worse. And they, and their clients, seldom believe a word of it.

It often boomerangs because the employer is so offended that they choose to defend the case at all costs rather than pay the employee anything. Or, as some put it to me, I would rather spend money on you than on this employee who has said all of these horrible untruths.

Not only do such allegations often make cases difficult to settle but they create financial and reputational risk for the employee. The employee will never receive a reference after that. And when I act for an employer that receives such allegations in a statement of claim, I pivot to transforming the case into one which focuses on the allegations and their palpable untruth. The employee’s credibility is shattered in all aspects of the case. I also ask for costs at the end, both because the employee will lose that (time-consuming) portion of the case and because, as I argue, the court should make an award which provides a disincentive to calumnious allegations that take up court time

So, with all these risks, why do lawyers do it?

They do it because such allegations attract punitive or other damages that are not taxable. And they are hoping to not have to actually prove any of this nonsense but to settle the case with an allocation to general (i.e. non-taxable) damages.

It is good for the employer too since it permits it to pay less in severance pay while providing the employee the same net return. For example, if someone is at the highest tax bracket, a payment of $50,000 in general damages is worth over $100,000 to them in severance pay so the employer saves monies in the settlement by providing some of the monies as general damages.

What employers invariably ask, in return for agreeing to pay these non-taxable amounts, is to be indemnified by the employee in the unlikely event that the Canada Revenue Agency actually audits and finds that this non-taxable payment was not bona fide and was really disguised severance rather than a payment for human rights abuses or toxic treatment.

In other words, if the CRA comes back at them for the tax they should have withheld, the indemnity requires the employee to reimburse them. Since more than 95 per cent of the time such a payment is not bona fide, the employer always insists on such an indemnity. But I have yet to hear of a case where this indemnity was ever called on, in the thousands of such cases in which I have been involved, because the CRA simply would not catch it through any normal audit procedure.

As of June 22, if such an indemnity is provided in return for a non-taxable payment as part of a severance agreement, the employer and employee must separately disclose, in a RC312, this settlement to the CRA within 90 days, along with a detailed description of the parties, the facts and the tax consequences. Failure to comply will result in substantial monetary fines as well as the likelihood of the tax benefit being disallowed. If not reported in a timely fashion, the CRA has the ability to reassess the taxpayer for a three or four-year period, depending on the type of taxpayer.

Needless to say, if most of these general damage transactions are reported so that the CRA scrutinizes them, they will be disallowed. As a result, few employers are going to participate in what has been pretty close to a tax fraud, albeit practiced with abandon in the employment bar.

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1) Either employers will only pay non-taxable damages as severance if they truly believe there is an overwhelming legal basis for it, something that would eliminate 95 per cent of such payments. In which case an indemnity was unnecessary anyway; or

2) Employers, to obtain the advantage of paying non-taxable general damages to make their severance settlements, will not ask for an indemnity agreement and take the chance that the CRA will not spot it, or, if it does, will assess it against the primary taxpayer, the employee, who they will hope has the resources to pay the extra money.

Wrongful dismissal cases in Canada have just become more difficult to settle.

Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt Sheikh, employment and labour lawyers with offices in Toronto and Hamilton. He practices employment law in eight provinces. He is the author of six books including the Law of Dismissal in Canada.

 WINNIPEG

UNION BUSTING

Curtains for Celebrations Dinner Theatre

Author of the article:

Winnipeg Sun

Published Sep 08, 2023  • 

Celebrations Dinner Theatre in Winnipeg. In midst of a strike action, Celebrations Dinner Theatre announced Friday, Sept. 8, 2023, that after 25 years it is closing its doors permanently, citing financial pressures. It's ad cast and box office staff had been on the picket line since Tuesday. 

PHOTO BY GLEN DAWKINS /Winnipeg Sun

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In midst of a strike action, Celebrations Dinner Theatre announced Friday that after 25 years it is closing its doors permanently, citing financial pressures.

Advertisement 2“Faced with the huge cost of inflation on many fronts including the ever-increasing cost of goods of every kind, increased cost of wages, rising interest rates, and left-over debt from a global pandemic, we have decided that we are no longer able to operate at a profitable level,” a statement from Celebrations Dinner Theatre said. “We see no other viable road forward that would lead to having a profitable dinner theatre business in this market.”

In a statement, the union representing its striking workers which have been on the picket line since Tuesday said Bob Cunningham, the owner of Act Three Entertainment Inc., notified the union Friday afternoon that Celebrations was choosing to close its doors permanently and that the union’s members were notified that they have been terminated, effective immediately.

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The members really believed in their work at Celebrations, they even paid out of pocket for their own costumes and they were hopeful that the company would recognize their dedication in return,” said Jeff Traeger, President of UFCW Local 832. “It’s shameful that the business model for Celebrations didn’t account for paying employees a fair wage or offering them any benefits, and the employer chose to close their doors instead of treating their employees with the respect they deserve.”

As with many workers, inflation and economic conditions have made it difficult for the workers to make ends meet, the union said, and they chose to wait three years for the business to find its footing after the pandemic. The business was fully operational and busier than ever when the union and Celebrations began bargaining earlier this year. Despite that, Celebrations refused to provide more than minimum wage and its workers voted unanimously in favour of strike action.

UFCW 832 represents 33 members who work for Celebration Dinner Theatre in ad cast and box office. The Union has ensured that all members are aware of the employer’s decision, and will be helping them with career transition and employment insurance in the days ahead. Their picket line closed up on Friday evening.

Toronto

How 2 developers got the Greenbelt land they wanted

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2 wealthy land development firms had long been eyeing Greenbelt, ethics watchdog found

Liam Casey · The Canadian Press · Posted: Sep 08, 2023 

Ontario Premier Doug Ford maintained for years that his government would not open Greenbelt land to development, but shifted gears after winning a second majority in 2022. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

While no one explicitly told developers that Ontario planned to open up the protected Greenbelt for housing last year, the government telegraphed that message to builders through actions — and silence, the province's integrity commissioner found.

Central to that indirect communication was a conference where certain developers had access to the housing minister's chief of staff — two investigations found those builders ended up with 92 per cent of the sites taken out of the Greenbelt.

What took place at that conference, and some of what followed, is laid out in the report issued last week by commissioner J. David Wake, offering insight into the world of Ontario's developers and how they interact with the government.

"Communication ... can take many forms. It is not confined to the spoken word," Wake wrote in the report that described the housing minister's chief-of-staff, Ryan Amato, receiving packages from developers and later seeking further information.

"I find that these actions were tantamount to Mr. Amato saying the words he had been careful not to say."

• ASK CBC NEWS
  Your Greenbelt controversy questions answered

• How developers influenced the Ford government to open up their Greenbelt land for housing

Wake found that then-housing minister Steve Clark violated ethics rules during the province's process of removing 15 sites from the Greenbelt to build 50,000 homes and adding land to the protected area elsewhere. Clark resigned days after the report while Amato resigned in mid-August, but denied wrongdoing.

Wake's investigation featured interviews with two prominent developers, Silvio De Gasperis and Michael Rice — neither responded to a request for comment from The Canadian Press. Amato's lawyer also did not respond to a request for comment.

Highway 413 signalled shift in Greenbelt policy

De Gasperis, the CEO of TACC Group of Companies, had for decades wanted to develop homes on one of his properties — known as Cherrywood — but it was in the Greenbelt, Wake wrote.

De Gasperis owned the land in the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve in Pickering, Ont., even prior to the creation of the Greenbelt in 2005 and felt it had improperly been made part of the protected area. He took the province to court over the designation, but ultimately lost.

The developer brought up the property with Premier Doug Ford after the Progressive Conservatives won the June 2018 election, "telling him Cherrywood is the perfect land for housing."

Ford told De Gasperis he couldn't do it.

• 1,200 homes on prime farmland: What's known about the plan to develop the Greenbelt in Pickering, Ont.

• Mysterious consultant known as 'Mr. X' in Greenbelt report ID'd as former Clarington mayor: sources

The premier did not touch the Greenbelt in his first term — he initially told developers in February 2018 that he planned to open up the area but backtracked during the election campaign.

De Gasperis nonetheless took note of the Progressive Conservatives' pledge to build Highway 413 north of Toronto, a route running through Greenbelt land.

"This suggested to him there might be an opportunity to revisit the government's Greenbelt policy," Wake wrote.

When Ford won the 2022 election, De Gasperis set his sights on Amato, Clark's chief of staff.

The hamlet of Cherrywood, located in Pickering, Ont., inside the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve, on land that was removed from the Greenbelt last December. Tacc Developments is working on plans for a subdivision south of here that would include a minimum of 1,200 housing units. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

Package was exchanged at industry dinner

The opportunity to speak with Amato came on Sept. 14, 2022, at a dinner at the Building Industry and Land Development conference.

De Gasperis was seated at the same table as Amato and came armed with a package that his daughter, the director of planning for TACC Developments, put together to make the case for Cherrywood.

"I have a package I want you to take a look at — there was an injustice done at Cherrywood and I want you to take a look," De Gasparis said to Amato.

He handed over the envelope and told Amato to reach out to his daughter with questions. Amato said he would take a look.

Cherrywood, barren of houses, was the "biggest disappointment in his career," De Gasperis told Wake.

De Gasperis' daughter told the integrity commissioner she did not see an opportunity to raise Greenbelt removal requests with the province until the 2022 election, when she noticed Ford did not renew his commitment to not touch the area.

"From that silence, she saw an opening that it might be reconsidering that position," Wake wrote.

• More Greenbelt land could be opened to development, new housing minister says

• Ontario will 're-evaluate' sites in Greenbelt land swap as part of sweeping review, Ford says

In early October, Amato called Alana De Gasperis seeking more information. She asked if Cherrywood would be removed from the Greenbelt.

"The government is looking at everything at this moment and have not made any decisions," Amato told her.

She then asked if he could look at other properties.

"He didn't say yes, he didn't say no," she told the integrity commissioner.

She took that opportunity to tell Amato about three other sites: one in Richmond Hill, Ont., another in Vaughan, Ont., and one in Hamilton that TACC co-owned with a friend of her father's.

She heard little from Amato until Nov. 3, 2022, when he called her to deliver good news: those four parcels of land were coming out of the Greenbelt.

Former housing minister Steve Clark resigned the post on Labour Day, in the wake of the integrity commissioner's report. (Alex Lupul/CBC)

Another prominent developer gets land removed

Michael Rice, another prominent land developer, was also at the same developers' dinner where Silvio De Gasperis had handed his Cherrywood package to Amato.

Rice told the integrity commissioner he thought it was likely the Greenbelt would be opened up, particularly after the government passed legislation giving the housing minister power to decide growth areas and reducing the role of conservation authorities.

"If, by 2022, a developer was not thinking about the Greenbelt opening up, 'they were asleep,"' Rice, who leads the Rice Group of Companies, told Wake.

In December 2021, Rice had staff identify Greenbelt lands he could purchase and, by May 2022, he entered into an agreement to buy a 687-acre property in King Township, Ont., with partners for $80 million.

• Ontario Housing Minister Steve Clark resigns amid Greenbelt land swap controversy

• Ontario has a new housing minister. But the Greenbelt is still his problem

That deal closed on Sept. 15, 2022, the day after the dinner where Rice spoke briefly with Amato.

"If you guys are looking at the Greenbelt lands, I have something great that is the site you need to look at," Rice had told Amato, according to Wake.

A few days later, Amato called Rice seeking more information. Amato then came to Rice's office to pick up an information package at the end of September.

Amato's visit told Rice "they were looking at the Greenbelt," the developer told Wake.

A little more than a month later that land would no longer be in the Greenbelt.

Days after Wake's report, Ford announced a review of all Greenbelt lands. The new housing minister has said that process could see sites added or removed to the area.

 

Urban development 'nibbling' away at Metro Vancouver's sensitive ecosystems: report

Metro Vancouver's urban core is losing hundreds of hectares of sensitive ecosystems annually as regional planners attempt to increase protected lands by 25 per cent, by 2050.

Graeme Wood
about 12 hours ago

Burns Bog in Delta.Sandor Gyarmati/Delta Optimist

Metro Vancouver continues to lose hundreds of hectares of sensitive ecosystems per each year while simultaneously seeking to increase the amount of protected land by 2050, a new report to the regional government’s board of directors shows.

Metro Vancouver senior planner Laurie Bates-Frymel reported that the region, from Lions Bay and eastward to Maple Ridge and Langley, contains 176,429 hectares of “sensitive and modified” ecosystem, which largely includes the North Shore’s forests and the Fraser River estuary, including Boundary Bay and Roberts Bank.

Since 2009 the region has lost 2,500 hectares, 1,800 of which came within the urban core, which only accounts for 33,554 hectares, comprising largely of grasslands, streams and large parks — such as Burns Bog, the UBC Endowment Lands and Stanley Park — intertwined with human infrastructure.

“The speed and scale of this ongoing loss is concerning for many reasons,” including loss of flood protection, carbon storage, urban heat mitigation and mental and physical health benefits, said Bates-Frymel.

The losses, however, do appear to be abating, said Bates-Frymel.

The region lost just 900 hectares between 2014 and 2020, whereas it lost 1,600 between 2009 and 2014 — just over the size of New Westminster.

“That’s good news. We’re slowing down the loss of ecosystems,” said Bates-Frymel.

More recently, the region lost 700 hectares of forest, 400 hectares of which were in the urban core.

“The nature of ecosystem loss observed over the last five years ranges widely, from the clearing of large, high-quality ecosystems, to small, disturbed remnant patches,” Bates-Frymel’s report states.

“Even smaller losses, or nibbling, can add up to large losses over the long-term,” Bates-Frymel told the board.

There are many causes of ecosystem loss, she noted: 34 per cent to logging; 23 per cent to agriculture; 16 per cent residential development; 10 per cent mowing and clearing; and six per cent industrial development, most notably.

“There’s definitely trade-offs,” said Bates-Frymel, noting the most permanent losses are via human development, as agriculture and cleared forests can often return back to a sensitive ecosystem.

While these lands are being lost, Metro Vancouver is aiming to increase the amount of permanently protected sensitive ecosystems, from 40 per cent of the land mass to 50 per cent by 2050.

Bates-Frymel said the process involves park acquisition by Metro Vancouver, municipalities, First Nations and the provincial government; but also conservation groups and private citizens.

Bates-Frymel’s report titled Sensitive Ecosystem Inventory Update 2014-2020 Change Summary was received unanimously by the board on Sep. 7.