Ford government taps veteran PC strategist to help with Greenbelt, Vegas fallout

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a new Village Media website devoted exclusively to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.

In the wake of a tumultuous few months, the Ford government has turned to a well-known problem-solver in Progressive Conservative circles to help it try to avoid future crises.

Longtime strategist Deb Hutton was tapped by the government to provide crisis response management support while it continues to navigate the fallout of the Greenbelt scandal and the Las Vegas trip fiasco connected to it, three Conservative sources told The Trillium.

“(Hutton) has volunteered to work with the government as part of our commitment to improve processes and conduct of political staff as recommended in the auditor general’s (Greenbelt) report,” Caitlin Clark, a spokesperson for Premier Doug Ford, said in an email on Monday.

Hutton met with all of Ford's cabinet ministers’ chiefs of staff last week “to share her experience in government and offer her perspective on preventing conflicts of interests” and has “volunteered to continue those discussions with chiefs of staff as we work to set up even tighter rules around potential conflicts of interest," Clark said. 

The government isn’t paying Hutton for this work, sources said.

Over her three-decade-long career, Hutton has weaved between jobs in politics, government and the private sector, specializing in solving communications and media crises along the way.

She was a senior adviser to former PC premiers Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, earning the nickname “Premier Hutton” at Queen's Park thanks to the influence she held, according to stories by the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star.

Hutton has worked previously in the Ford government, serving for a few months in early 2020 as a temporary chief of staff to Caroline Mulroney, Ontario’s transportation minister at the time.

Hutton currently sits on Metrolinx’s board of directors, which is a part-time role. Mulroney appointed her via a cabinet order to a three-year-long term on the board in January 2022.

Hutton also helped the PCs’ 2022 re-election campaign out, including by acting as then-NDP leader Andrea Horwath in Ford’s practice debates, the Star reported.

Hutton is married to Tim Hudak, leader of Ontario’s PCs from 2009 to 2014 and CEO of the Ontario Real Estate Association since 2016.

Since the auditor general's Greenbelt report was released on Aug. 9, much of the Ford government's time has been spent managing the fallout of wider controversy.

Between then and Sept. 21, when Ford promised to reverse the Greenbelt removals, two cabinet ministers and two senior staffers involved in the scandal resigned.

The day after Ford’s apology, the premier rearranged his cabinet for the second time in three weeks, partly to account for a gap created by Kaleed Rasheed’s resignation earlier that week. 

On Sept. 19, Rasheed admitted to giving Ontario’s integrity commissioner wrong information about an early 2020 Las Vegas trip that The Trillium reported over the summer that the MPP had gone on with a developer who owned land later removed from the Greenbelt.

Rasheed announced his resignation from Ford’s cabinet and the PC caucus the next day while the governing party's MPPs were gathered in Niagara Falls.

Ford’s housing policy director, who The Trillium also reported in July as having gone on the early 2020 Las Vegas trip, resigned around the same time. He and the premier’s former principal secretary, the fourth participant in the trip, each also retroactively submitted information to the integrity commissioner to correct certain details they’d previously given the office.

Integrity Commissioner J. David Wake interviewed each of those whom The Trillium had reported as having gone on the Las Vegas trip as part of his investigation into how the land was selected to be removed from the Greenbelt. The report Wake’s office published on Aug. 30, three weeks after the auditor general’s, further fuelled scrutiny of the government’s plan to have developers build 50,000 homes on 7,400 acres of land it removed from the Greenbelt.

Last Monday, Oct. 16, Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Paul Calandra tabled a bill to reverse last year’s Greenbelt removals.

The auditor general had estimated that the developers owning the removed land would benefit by upwards of $8.3 billion, due to increases in the values of the properties.

The auditor general also made 15 recommendations in her Greenbelt report, which was the last the office released before the end of Bonnie Lysyk’s 10-year tenure in early September. Lysyk’s recommendations to the Ford government included re-evaluating the Greenbelt changes and tightening up how political staff do their jobs in line with ethics laws.

In an Aug. 14 memo that was also sent to journalists, Patrick Sackville, Ford’s chief of staff, told cabinet ministers’ chiefs of staff and the government’s deputy ministers that “a working group” was being set up by the government to implement the 15 recommendations made by the auditor. Hutton isn’t a part of this working group.

The integrity commissioner is also going to be presenting to and working with chiefs of staff "to ensure they are meeting the highest standards expected of all public servants," Ford's spokesperson said.

The Greenbelt controversy and Las Vegas trip scandal linked to it also dramatically impacted the PCs’ standing in public opinion polls. They’ve rebounded, however, since Ford’s reversal, according to an Abacus Data survey done for the Star earlier this month.

The PCs’ comeback in the polls came just after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police shared that it had launched an investigation into whether there was criminality behind the Greenbelt changes.

The opposition NDP is also hoping the integrity commissioner will dig deeper into the Las Vegas trip. Last Wednesday, NDP Leader Marit Stiles asked Wake to launch an investigation focused on the trip — which was only a sidebar in his Greenbelt-focused investigation.

In an email confirming the integrity commissioner’s office had received Stiles’ request last week, its spokesperson highlighted that Wake must pause investigations of his own into an MPP if he discovers “the subject matter of the inquiry is being investigated by police or that a charge has been laid.”