Ontario's Premier Accountability Dashboard · Queen's Park Watch
Silvio De Gasperis
TACC Group of Companies
Estimated cost to Ontario
>$18.3B
President of the TACC Group of Companies, one of Ontario's largest land developers. A major donor to the PC Party of Ontario. His company's lands were among those removed from the Greenbelt in 2022, and TACC-controlled companies also hold extensive land along the Highway 413 and Bradford Bypass corridors.
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.
TACC Group lands in Pickering, Vaughan, and King Township were removed from the Greenbelt, dramatically increasing their development value. De Gasperis and related entities donated over $294,000 to the PC Party. He subsequently fought a summons from the Auditor General's office.
Ford revived two cancelled highway megaprojects — the $8.6–12 billion Highway 413 and the $2–4 billion Bradford Bypass — despite independent studies showing negligible traffic benefits. Developers who own thousands of acres along both routes donated over $800,000 to Ford's PCs. Both projects were shielded from meaningful federal environmental review.
TACC Corporation and affiliated companies began acquiring land near the Bradford Bypass route immediately after the 1997 environmental assessment. With the Ford government reviving the project, those holdings stand to increase substantially in value. The DeGasperis consortium employed both Peter Van Loan and Frank Klees as lobbyists targeting Transportation Minister Mulroney and Premier Ford.
Under cover of a tariff emergency, Doug Ford passed omnibus legislation that repealed Ontario's Endangered Species Act, created law-free "special economic zones" where cabinet can suspend any provincial rule for handpicked companies, and quietly cancelled environmental assessments for a landfill owned by $200,000 PC donors — repeating the exact playbook of the Greenbelt scandal with no limits and no oversight.
As owner of TACC Construction and a major landowner along the Highway 413 corridor, De Gasperis is a direct beneficiary of Bill 5's repeal of Ontario's Endangered Species Act. Provincial habitat protections for the redside dace and other at-risk species in 11 waterways along the 413 route were eliminated by the bill, removing the primary species-based obstacle to corridor construction.