In her report, Bonnie Lysyk, the auditor general, concluded that the process for picking the land for development was largely directed by the housing minister’s chief of staff. And the report found that process was heavily influenced by two developers who, at a housing conference, handed the political aide envelopes detailing the land they wanted removed from the Greenbelt. The aide then directed a selection process that sidelined the usual reviews by nonpartisan public servants and proper public consultations.

In the end, Ms. Lysyk found, the aide picked 14 of the 15 parcels of land that were removed from the Greenbelt.

“We found that how the land sites were selected was not transparent, fair, objective, or fully informed,” Ms. Lysyk wrote, adding: “What occurred here cannot be described as a standard or defensible process.”

Land owned by those two developers, she concluded, makes up 92 percent of the Greenbelt land now open to development. That change, the audit calculated, raised the land’s value by 8.3 billion Canadian dollars.