This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Ontario’s integrity commissioner found a lawyer working for two developers who owned land the Ford government removed from the Greenbelt in 2022 “failed to comply” with the province’s lobbying law by not registering with its office.
A notice on the Office of the Integrity Commissioner’s website says Katarzyna Sliwa failed to file lobbying registrations after sending two letters to a public office holder in 2022. Sliwa, a partner at the law firm Dentons, couldn’t immediately be reached by The Trillium for comment.
“One letter requested the amendment of the regulation then establishing the Greenbelt area boundaries on behalf of one client, and the other requested three specific amendments to a Government of Ontario policy, specifically the Greenbelt plan, on behalf of two clients,” the notice on the integrity commissioner’s website said.
Two letters Sliwa sent were detailed in Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake’s report on the Greenbelt changes that his office published almost a year ago.
Weeks before Premier Doug Ford’s government proposed taking 7,400 acres in 15 different parcels of land out of the Greenbelt on Nov. 4, 2022, Sliwa sent letters to the then-housing minister’s chief of staff, who was leading the selection of lands to remove, according to Wake’s report.
In a letter dated Sept. 27, 2022, Sliwa — working for Flato Developments’ Shakir Rehmatullah — wrote the housing minister’s staffer “to request the Greenbelt Plan boundary be revised to exclude a portion of her client’s lands at this location,” Wake’s report said.
In another letter Sliwa sent the then-housing minister’s chief of staff, dated Oct. 18, 2022, she wrote that she was counsel to both Flato and the Wyview Group and requested Greenbelt changes, along with other moves to facilitate their development, according to Wake’s report.
Land Flato and Wyview owned were taken out of the protected area weeks later. After the scandal boiled over last summer, Ford’s government returned the land it had removed to the Greenbelt.
Wake wrote that Rehmatullah said he believed his lawyers told him about the opportunity to request Greenbelt changes. Sliwa, meanwhile, told the commissioner that Rehmatullah told her to send the Flato request to the housing minister’s chief of staff.
In his second interview with Wake, Rehmatullah “finally admitted … that he had instructed his solicitors to make the removal requests to (the staffer) since he was a contact,” the commissioner wrote — though Rehmatullah insisted to Wake that the requests were in “‘the normal course of business to ask consultants to keep submitting.’”
“I find that Mr. Rehmatullah’s position strains credulity,” the integrity commissioner concluded.
Sliwa is not currently registered to lobby the provincial government for any clients, and has no previous registrations for Flato or Wyview.
“By the time the investigation started, she was 398 days late to register her lobbying activity for the first client and 377 days late to register her activity for the second client,” the notice recently posted on the integrity commissioner’s website says.
“Ms. Sliwa’s failure to register undermines the (Lobbyists Registration) Act’s purpose of transparency. The Lobbyist Registrar directed that her name be published with a brief description of the non-compliance.”
—With files from Jessica Smith Cross and Jack Hauen
