Doug Ford government poised to reveal its Greenbelt protection bill

Premier Doug Ford's climbdown on removing land from Ontario's protected Greenbelt for housing is expected to go into legislation on Monday. 

Ford's Progressive Conservative government is set to table a bill that will reverse its 2022 move to give the owners of certain Greenbelt properties the right to build housing, boosting their land values by an amount the auditor general pegged at $8.3 billion.

The premier announced the reversal on Sept. 21, apologized for breaking his promise not to touch the Greenbelt and has not held a news conference since. 

The PCs hoped the U-turn would put an end to the controversy. Those hopes have been dampened by new developments that suggest Ford's push to open up land for housing will remain in the spotlight for months, if not years:  

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Mitch Heimpel, a former senior political staffer for the PCs, now director of campaigns and government relations with Enterprise Canada, a public affairs firm, says the controversy has left little room for public attention to the government's progress on any other topic.

"The government would probably prefer to be talking about anything else at this particular point," he said.

"It's just hard to get the message out when you're dealing with a constant issues-management fire like where they are on the Greenbelt," Heimpel said in an interview with CBC News. 

The bill expected Monday is part of the government's efforts to put out that political fire.   

The government doesn't actually need to bring in legislation to return the land to the Greenbelt. The removals last November were made through a cabinet decision, so the government could make the reversal happen simply by rescinding that cabinet order. 

Instead, Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra says the bill he plans to table on Monday will strengthen protection of the Greenbelt by defining its boundaries in law. 

WATCH | Ford government changed Ottawa's boundaries to make this land part of city:

It's against Ontario law for any government to reduce the total land area of the Greenbelt under the current terms of the Greenbelt Act, introduced in 2005 by the then-Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty. 

That does allow for government to remove parcels of land from the Greenbelt, so long as other parcels of equal or greater size are added.