It does seem strange that Ontario municipal affairs and housing minister Steve Clark’s chief of staff Ryan Amato is currently reported to be vacationing in Italy. He might have a reason to not be enjoying a ‘staycation’ in Ontario this year. It appears that his boss Clark and premier Ford have thrown him under the bus in the time-honoured tradition of politicians everywhere.
Finding a scapegoat is the first political step when putting the fix in. And it seems Mr. Amato is the hand-picked choice of premier Ford to front for the phonies. It makes you wonder just where the tickets for Italy came from? Where they one-way?
I can just imagine Premier Ford’s reaction when he first saw the winsome tale of the envelopes Mr. Amato collected from the premier’s developer friends. It seems he got a couple here at a party in Woodbridge. There were more. He mentioned the piles of them to the auditor. She must have been sitting there with her mouth agape listening to how this play was made.
The real beauty of all this is that Mr. Amato did not appear to think he was doing anything wrong. The only question that I would like to hear answered by him is who the hell told him to do this? I have never met Mr. Amato and I do not know him, but I do know lots about the so-called job he was doing. He would not be doing all of the things he told the auditor he was doing without someone, in authority, telling him to do it. It is not his scheme.
And Amato was not dealing with friends of the housing minister. The people he was dealing with were people with ties to Doug Ford back when he was with his brother Rob at Toronto city hall. Many of those developers and their lawyers liked Doug Ford. They saw him as a brash, uneducated, bluff salesman. He was meat for their dinner.
What is mind-boggling about all of the Greenbelt BS is that Doug Ford is holding the line. He states bluntly that nobody had preferential treatment. The only money that has changed hands anywhere in this arrangement is the, maybe, always legal money to the conservatives in Ontario. It could be that Doug Ford might just have his own card for their ATMs.
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