Editor's note: Shortly after this story was published, Liberal MPP Ted Hsu wrote a letter to the province's integrity commissioner requesting an investigation into the matters reported here.
Weeks before last year’s byelection in Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, Ontario’s environment minister offered major relief to many local voters: the Ford government would halt controversial expansion plans for a dump in a town in the riding by requiring an examination of its environmental impacts.
Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives then ran a candidate in the byelection who was on record opposing the expansion of the Dresden landfill, and he won.
At first, the Ford government kept its promise, designating the site for an environmental assessment that would dictate how — or if — expanding operations of the dump in the 3,000-person town would move forward.
Now, with one of its first pieces of legislation since winning re-election a few months ago, the Ford government is planning to cancel the environmental assessment that had been heralded as a win for the community by local politicians and residents alike.
Ford’s justification for the flip-flop is that uncertainties caused by U.S. President Donald Trump demand more landfill capacity in Ontario, which heavily relies on shipping waste south of the border.
So what makes the Dresden dump special, out of the hundreds of landfills in Ontario? The premier’s office didn’t respond to questions about why or how it came to be singled out as part of Bill 5, nor any other questions on the topic that The Trillium asked its spokespeople in an email before this story’s publication.
An analysis of numerous records and data show that the developer owners of the dump property in Dresden are prolific donors to Ford’s PC Party. Together with their family members and executives of their companies, they have donated roughly $200,000 to the PCs since the year they came into power.
Records, and a couple of well-placed sources, suggest that some of those donations were for a few tickets to a political fundraiser for the PCs that Ford attended, just weeks after his environment minister at the time promised the environmental assessment.
The dump’s owners also have a history of shared ties with some of the political allies who have been key to Ford’s success over the course of his career in elected office.
The official Opposition critic for environment issues, NDP MPP Peter Tabuns, was blunt in his assessment of the various links between Ford, his party and the owners of the Dresden dump: “It stinks,” he said.
“These people who are putting forward this landfill are connected to the premier. They’ve been very generous to the Tories. They’re well-connected to the Tories,” Tabuns said in an interview. “Even though the premier made a promise during the election, he’s making sure his friends get looked after.”
The Dresden landfill site is under the ownership of a pair of corporations, with marginally different variations of the name “Whitestone Fields.” They were incorporated this January, then came to own the property through a transaction with York1 Environmental Waste Solutions Ltd. All three companies are controlled by developers Andrew Guizzetti and Daniel Guizzetti, and one of their business partners, Brian Brunetti.
The Guizzetti brothers are fixtures of Ontario’s real estate and construction industries. With Brunetti, their York1 brand of companies offers various construction, waste collection and disposal, environmental services and more.
The Guizzetti brothers also oversee Willowdale Asset Management, an umbrella including several real estate businesses with “close to $5 billion in assets under management, according to its website. Willowdale includes Empire Communities, which has built over 10,000 homes in Ontario, according to Home Construction Regulatory Authority-published data.
The Guizzetti brothers have both donated the maximum amounts an individual is allowed to contribute to a provincial party in Ontario to the PCs in multiple of the last few years, political donor data kept by Elections Ontario shows. They and people matching the names of their family members have donated around $100,000 combined to the PC party, its riding associations and candidates since 2018, the year Ford won its leadership and was elected premier.
York1 and Willowdale each stem from businesses that were first set up decades ago by elder members of the Guizzetti family, including Andrew and Daniel’s father and uncle.
Brunetti and other executives of their companies have given more than another $100,000 to the PCs since 2018, as well. The Guizzetti brothers have incorporated dozens of companies over the last few decades, making it difficult to determine precisely how much the higher-ups at their businesses have given in total to the PCs.
Before this story’s publication, neither of the Guizzetti brothers, nor Brunetti, had responded to lists of questions that were sent to them by email.
The Guizzetti brothers and Brunetti acquired the Dresden landfill site in December 2022, at first holding it through a York1 company, its property record shows. The land’s use as a dump dates back decades, including long before Ontario’s current environmental assessment system was set up.
The expansion that the Guizzetti brothers' and Brunetti’s company is seeking would be a major one. After receiving York1’s proposal, the provincial government posted it for public feedback in January 2024, showing what it envisioned: a 30-fold increase to the size of its waste facility, new buildings, 24/7 operations, capabilities to receive more types of waste, and massive increases to the total amount that would be trucked in.
It received intense pushback from residents, local politicians, and environmental advocacy organizations. There was no local MPP at the time, with a byelection looming, but at least a couple of PC MPPs from other nearby ridings in southwestern Ontario either said or suggested they were against it, according to statements published by the London Free Press.
Asked about the local opposition to the proposed expansion of the Dresden dump at a news conference on March 11, 2024, Ford responded, “I’ve got to apologize, this is the first I’ve heard about it.”
“Do you know what I believe in? I believe in the people; the people like something, we do it. If they don’t, we don’t do it,” Ford added. “It’s about as simple as that. But, let’s have a chat (with local officials). There might be other reasons.”
Then-environment minister Andrea Khanjin announced four days later that the province would require a “comprehensive environmental assessment” of the site before any expansion plans could go forward, effectively stalling it for the foreseeable future.
“I’ve heard concerns raised by the local community and municipality regarding York1’s proposal to reopen and expand a dormant landfill … In keeping with the process that any other landfill would be required to undergo today, I will be taking steps to require this project to complete a comprehensive environmental assessment,” Khanjin wrote in a post on X on March 15, 2024.
Shortly afterwards, over a 10-day timeframe spanning late March to early April 2024, three Willowdale company executives each made donations of exactly $945 to the PC party, political contribution filings show.
Around 50 people in total donated this exact amount to the party in that couple-week period. Another two were lobbyists who were registered then, or months earlier, to lobby for Empire Communities. They also included at least several more lobbyists and people from other sectors.
Political contributions of the same specific amount, slightly below a round number, by people or small groups with connections to each other, can be an indicator that they were for fundraising event tickets. In these cases, the donation amount is the ticket price less the per-person cost of putting on the fundraiser.
From late March to early May 2024, the PC party advertised at least seven $1,000-a-ticket fundraisers on its website around the same time, including at least three Ford planned to attend.
Two people who made a donation of $945 to the PCs at that time said their contributions were to go to a $1,000-a-ticket fundraising event that they attended and that Ford was at too. The Trillium granted these donors anonymity because they’re otherwise uninvolved aside from attending a PC party fundraiser. One recalled the fundraiser they attended as being in the first few days of April 2024, and around 50 to 60 people there.
None of the three Willowdale company executives who at the time made $945 political donations to the PCs responded to questions The Trillium asked them in emails before this story’s publication. The lobbyist who donated $945 at that time to the PCs and had been registered for Empire Communities months before said his firm wasn’t involved in anything to do with the Dresden dump.
Ford called two byelections on April 3, 2024, including the one for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, where Dresden is located. Steve Pinsonneault ran for the PCs in the riding. He opposed the landfill’s expansion both before, when he was a municipal councillor in Chatham-Kent, and while campaigning to be elected to Queen’s Park.
Pinsonneault cruised to victory in the May 2, 2024 Lambton—Kent—Middlesex byelection, defeating his closest challenger by a margin of more than 30 per cent of votes.
The Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks officially ordered the environmental assessment for the Dresden landfill site two months later. “Great news for Dresden,” Pinsonneault reacted in a post on X on July 5, 2024.
A review of numerous corporate records, lobbyists’ filings and other publicly accessible documents shows that the Guizzetti brothers’ businesses have in the past made connections with some key figures in Ford’s political career.
A previous longtime business partner of the Guizzetti brothers and Rob Ford got into hot water together with the City of Toronto’s integrity commissioner over a political fundraiser, early in the premier’s brother’s time as mayor, and his own time as a city councillor.
Early in Doug Ford’s time as premier, Nick Kouvalis’ firm Campaign Support was enlisted by one of the Guizzetti brothers’ companies to lobby the provincial government. Kouvalis has helped Ford throughout his political career as a pollster and strategist.
From March 2019 to March 2020, Kouvalis’ then-business partner was registered to lobby on York Environmental Solutions Ltd.’s behalf. Kouvalis himself did not. He was Campaign Support’s president at the time, according to corporate records. Kouvalis said in an email that the work his firm was hired for at the time pertained to a project in Toronto.
In 2021, York Group of Companies (York1’s predecessor) and Fengate Asset Management announced a “strategic partnership,” as a result of an investment Fengate made in York “on behalf of the LiUNA Pension Fund of Central and Eastern Canada.” The LiUNA pension fund is chaired by Joseph Mancinelli, a prominent private sector labour leader who has been an important political ally to the premier and the PCs while they’ve been in government.
In mid-2021, a year-and-a-half before the Guizzetti brothers’ and Brunetti’s company bought the landfill, they, eight of their family members, and eight other executives combined donated over $50,000 to the PC Party in just under two weeks. The donations were made days before what the PC Party billed as an “intimate and candid discussion” with Ford for buyers of $1,000 tickets.
Filling a void
On April 17, the day Bill 5 was introduced, Ford said in response to a reporter who asked why an exemption for the Dresden landfill was included in the legislation, “We’re tired of relying on the U.S.”
“Forty per cent of waste from companies and people are heading down to the U.S. Just imagine if, tomorrow, President Trump, and don’t put it past him … says we aren’t taking any more of Ontario’s waste,” Ford continued. “What do we do?”
Environment Minister Todd McCarthy, who Ford appointed to the role in a post-election cabinet shuffle in March, has made a similar argument.
“In the face of trade and tariff war threats, we have to be ready to address the landfill capacity issue,” McCarthy said at the legislature on Monday. “And we’ll be looking at landfill capacity all over the province.”
Ontario’s auditor general found from an audit in 2021 that if the trajectory of waste generation and disposal in the province was kept up, its total landfill capacity would be filled “within 11 to 14 years (by 2032 to 2035).”
The Association of Municipalities of Ontario found in 2023 that around one-third of waste generated in Ontario over the 16 previous years was sent to landfills in Michigan, New York and Ohio.
The Ford government passed legislation in 2020 affording municipalities greater veto power over new landfills that are proposed.
In an interview on Thursday, Liberal MPP Ted Hsu, his party’s critic on rural affairs issues, said he believed Ontario doesn’t “in the short term” have a lack of landfills. “In the long term, we may have a problem,” he said.
“As far as I know, there are no tariffs for moving garbage across the border. We have these immediate threats. People are losing their jobs now … If we’re going to deal with tariffs, we should be thinking about what we need to do today that will actually matter to people,” said Hsu, in discussing Bill 5’s inclusion of an exemption of an environmental assessment for the Dresden dump.
Title billing
The proposal to exempt the Dresden dump from the Environmental Assessment Act is a small sliver of Bill 5, legislation the Ford government titled the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act. The government described the bill upon its introduction as meant to slash red tape “that (has) held back major infrastructure, mining and resource development projects.”
Bill 5 would amend several other provincial laws and create a couple of new ones. The Special Economic Zones Act, one of the proposed new laws, would allow the government to designate areas as key to Ontario’s economy to free them from requirements under other laws that can have a stalling effect on their use or development. The Ford government has promised to designate the region in northern Ontario known as the Ring of Fire as a “special economic zone” to speed up how quickly companies can access mineral deposits there.
Energy and Mines Minister Stephen Lecce tabled Bill 5 on April 17, at the end of the first sitting week of Ontario’s 44th parliament. On Wednesday, Pinsonneault told The Trillium that he had been “briefed (on Bill 5) a few hours before it was released.”
Ford’s PCs have long railed against various types of red tape and government processes as limiting Ontario’s economy. During the campaign for Ontario’s general election earlier this year, the party promised to axe many of these barriers, making the case to voters that Trump’s threats make it all the more necessary to eliminate them.
The PC Party’s electoral platform did not mention the Dresden dump. Neither did any of the party’s news releases during the election campaign. Pinsonneault was re-elected the MPP for Lambton—Kent—Middlesex in the Feb. 27 general election, winning handily, again.
“I was obviously … disappointed,” Pinsonneault said on Wednesday, when asked at the legislature how he felt about Bill 5’s impact on the Dresden landfill. “I worked to get the environmental assessment in place.”
He also said he’s never dealt with the Guizzetti brothers. “I don’t even know who they are,” Pinsonneault said.
Hsu described the case of the Dresden dump as “like a canary in the coal mine.”
“Where ministers are giving themselves more power to make decisions, I think it's just too tempting for people who want to influence or have more influence over ministers to use event attendance and fundraising donations to do that,” Hsu said in an interview.
On Tuesday, 70 PC MPPs voted to advance Bill 5 to a study by the Standing Committee on the Interior. There were 43 NDP, Liberal, Green and Independent MPPs who voted against it. Pinsonneault was among the several MPPs who weren’t present to vote. He said the next day that he “had other business I had to look after.”
Other arguments opposition MPPs have made so far while debating Bill 5 have included calling the provision to exempt the Dresden dump from an environmental assessment a “broken promise” by the government and as being “against what the community wants.”
“I’m sorry — jeez, what could go wrong exempting a garbage dump from an environmental assessment?” Green Leader Mike Schreiner said in debate on Monday. “Those are in place to make sure things don’t leach into our waterway, to make sure that land around that dump doesn’t become contaminated, especially if it’s agricultural land.”
The Standing Committee on the Interior is scheduled to hold public hearings on Bill 5 on May 22 and 26.
—With files from Jessica Smith Cross
