Greenbelt scandal’s ‘Mr. X’ banned from lobbying for 2 years by Ontario Integrity Commissioner

A former mayor of Clarington, the notorious ‘Mr. X’ identified in an explosive 2023 Ontario Integrity Commissioner’s report on the greenbelt scandal, has been banned from lobbying for two years after a new report found he had “contravened” the Lobbyists Registration Act multiple times over the last decade.

John Mutton, who served as Clarington’s mayor from 2000 to 2006, launched Municipal Solutions, a company specializing in development services with special expertise in the building trades and “deep connections” in government, shortly after.

The new report from the commissioner’s office banned Mutton from lobbying Ontario government officials for two years, the most severe punishment allowed, for putting government officials in “real or potential” conflict of interest by offering gifts and financial incentives to government officials on numerous occasions during the lead-up to the land swap.

The land swap turned out to be a public relations disaster for the Doug Ford government after a scathing report released by now-retired Auditor General David Wake, who found more than 90 per cent of the land removed from the Greenbelt was at the request of lobbyists who attended a builders association dinner on September 14, 2022.

One of those lobbyists at that dinner was Mutton, who was attempting to sweet talk Ryan Amato, the housing minister chief of staff who was the first to take the fall when Wake’s report was released, into re-zoning an 86-acre parcel of land on Nash Road, located near where the Clarington communities of Courtice and Bowmanville meet.

Information on the land parcel was provided to Amato in the form of a GIS shapefile via a lunch meeting between Mutton (identified in the 2023 report only as ‘Mr. X’) and Amato’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Kirstin Jensen, though extracting even that bit of information was a laborious process for Wake during his interview with Amato.

Wake asked Amato how he got his hands on the shapefile:

That I don’t recall, maybe Mr. X.

How would you know to reach out to Mr. X?

I don’t know. I think maybe Kirstin. Kirstin got the deck for the Nash Road site.

How do you think she got it?

Well, I am just piecing…like, you are asking me to piece things together in my head. I think there was a meeting that she went to with Mr. X on something else, and I didn’t show up to. And that is really the only track I could say of how this would have come up.

What was that meeting supposed to be about that you didn’t show up to?

Probably official plans.

Why do you remember that meeting if you didn’t show up?

Because she yells at me when I don’t show up to stuff I say I am going to show up to.

The Nash Road file

That lunch took place on Sept. 27 at Joey Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto. Shortly after that meeting Amato provided the Greenbelt project team five USB keys with information on proposed sites for removal.

Amato insisted to Wake during the interviews he did not accept any favours from Mr. X in the form of sports or concert tickets, explaining he has tickets “regularly available” to him through his family and “does not care about such offers.” He admitted Mr. X did invite him for golf at the exclusive Goodwood Golf Club in Uxbridge but that he didn’t go.

When asked by Wake why he had not facilitated any other deals from the persistent Mr. X, Amato said people ask him for favours “all the time” but he only passes the information on to his boss if the deal makes sense.

Amato told Wake he didn’t think his office had actually done anything for any of Mutton’s clients. “I would have to go back and look, but to the best of my knowledge we haven’t.”

Amato, who admitted he has had dozens of contacts with Mr. X since the Greenbelt land swap was announced, chalked up his poor recollection of his relationship with Mutton as the product of his job.

“If you can do something you can, if you can’t, you can’t, but it doesn’t stop you listening to them, right?”

“You don’t just pull names out of a hat. Like, I am trying to build a million-and-a-half homes, and if Mr. X comes with something viable that makes sense, that the government can stand behind and support, I am happy to work with him.”

Amato told Wake it was “possible” he called Mutton November 3 to advise the government would be announcing a public consultation on removing this land from the Greenbelt, but he couldn’t be sure.

Wake noted in his report that Amato’s attempt to downplay his relationship with Mr. X “strains credulity somewhat.”

Mutton, through his contract with a local developer, stood to earn more than $1 million in development incentives if the land swap was ultimately successful and, perhaps coincidently, purchased a $300,000 Maserati days after meeting with Ford in the fall of 2022.

(It should be noted that section 3.2 of the Lobbyists Registration Act prohibits lobbying when payment is contingent on the degree of success in lobbying.)

The scandal forced Ford to reverse course on the land swap and cost him his housing minister and more than a handful of other key advisors and serving up new tidbits of subterfuge and alleged corruption every day for weeks in the fall of 2022.

After a month of media stories, cabinet minister resignations and damning reports, Ford finally called the Greenbelt swap a “mistake.”

The most valuable parcel of land in the swap was the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve (DRAP), a triangle-shaped property that increased in potential value by more than $6 billion as a result of the deal. DRAP also contained two-thirds of the 7,400 acres of Greenbelt lands and more than three-quarters of the $8 billion-plus in land value that went to a few select developers who were at that September 2022 dinner.

John Mutton (Mr. X) with Ontario Premier Doug Ford