New Ontario housing minister to take questions amid ongoing Greenbelt controversy | CBC News

Ontario’s new housing minister Paul Calandra is set to face questions Wednesday as he prepares to launch a sweeping review of the Greenbelt, including 14 sites that were controversially earmarked for housing development last year.

Calandra is scheduled to hold a news conference at 10 a.m. ET at Queen’s Park. You can watch it live in this story.

It will be Calandra’s first time speaking to media in his new role. He was appointed in a cabinet shuffle Monday, just hours after former housing minister Steve Clark resigned the position.

Clark stepped down following a damning report from the province’s integrity commissioner that found he failed to properly oversee the process by which the ministry selected land for removal from the Greenbelt for housing construction.

Premier Doug Ford said Tuesday that Calandra, alongside a non-partisan provincial adjudicator, will initiate a wider review of all Greenbelt land as well as hundreds of development applications in the protected area. That includes plans for 14 sites chosen by the housing ministry last year in a process that both the integrity commissioner and auditor general found was rushed and flawed.

Ford said that the plans for the sites will need to “stand on their own merit” but also suggested that development will continue in the meantime. 

The previous Liberal government mandated in 2005 that Greenbelt lands be reviewed every 10 years. The last review was completed in 2015, meaning the province is moving up the timeline by about two years. Ford did not say how long he expects the review will take, but the last one took about two years.

Opposition leaders have expressed concern the review is a pretext for the provincial government to open more Greenbelt land to development.