Ontario's Premier Accountability Dashboard · Queen's Park Watch
Ryan Amato
(former Ford chief of staff)
Estimated cost to Ontario
$8.3B
Chief of Staff to Housing Minister Steve Clark during the Greenbelt removals. The Auditor General found he was the "driving force" behind selecting which parcels of Greenbelt land were removed, bypassing normal civil service processes. Under RCMP investigation and named in civil litigation.
Connected Scandals
Premier Doug Ford secretly handed 15 parcels of protected Greenbelt farmland to well-connected developers through a three-week backroom process — a windfall worth $8.3 billion to those developers — and only reversed it after the Auditor General publicly exposed the scheme.
As Housing Minister's Chief of Staff, Amato directed the selection of 15 Greenbelt parcels for removal — a process the Auditor General said was improperly driven by his office rather than the civil service. He met with developers who stood to benefit and had access to confidential land information.
The Ford government buried amendments inside the 2026 Budget Bill that would permanently exempt the Premier, all cabinet ministers, and their staff from freedom-of-information requests — retroactive to 1988 — nullifying every pending FOI request and active court case, including those seeking Doug Ford's personal cellphone records and Greenbelt-related emails. Ontario's own privacy watchdog publicly called three of Ford's stated justifications factually incorrect.
As former chief of staff, Amato's personal-account emails about the Greenbelt land removals are subject to an IPC order requiring disclosure. The retroactive FIPPA amendments would nullify that order, permanently shielding his records from public scrutiny.