Jim Balsillie is accusing Liberal MP Adam Vaughan of lying during a meeting of the House of Commons’ ethics committee.

The accusations were laid out in a letter obtained by The Logic that was sent Monday morning to the chair of the committee, which questioned Waterfront Toronto executives last Thursday about the controversial smart-city development on Toronto’s waterfront.

Vaughan told the committee that Balsillie—the former Research in Motion (now BlackBerry) co-CEO and one of the development’s most prominent critics—admitted in a private meeting with the MP that he did not have experience with land-use development corporations, and that he “would throw Waterfront Toronto in front of Google to stop Google.”

Balsillie disputes that account of their December 2018 meeting. “For reasons known only to him, Mr. Vaughan intentionally and falsely stated what I said when we had met,” he wrote. He said he has asked Vaughan for an apology and a retraction.

“I stand by the comments I made at the committee, and they are straight from the meeting we had,” Vaughan told The Logic in a late Monday interview.

Balsillie’s letter follows several weeks of heightened controversy around the project, after the Toronto Star reported that Sidewalk Labs wanted a share of property taxes on the waterfront. Ontario’s provincial government, as well as some city councillors, have indicated they will not approve the project as is. However, Sidewalk Labs has said no plans have been finalized, and that it’s still hoping for government approval.

“My notes from that meeting indicate that Mr. Vaughan expressed deep worry that critics of the project would ‘run Google out of town,’” Balsillie wrote about the meeting. “My response to him was that no one was saying we need to run Google out of town but only that we should not put a vendor in charge of designing data governance.”

Vaughan told The Logic that Balsillie raised important points about data governance, collection and management, and that the two discussed the approaches that Barcelona as well as European countries had adopted. “Where I vehemently disagree with [Balsillie] is in his characterization of Waterfront Toronto, and his indifference to its future, and his outright hostility towards it,” Vaughan said.

The MP for Spadina–Fort York has been a vocal defender of Waterfront Toronto for months, often responding to people’s concerns on social media about the project.

In his letter, Balsillie wrote, “I also shared with him that I thought Waterfront Toronto had done excellent work for 15 years on traditional real estate development and should continue on that path but that they needed to separate land development from digital infrastructure.”

But Vaughan said, “I find his letter very curious, I find it almost revisionary in terms of the conversation, but also in terms of his other public statements about Waterfront Toronto.” He repeatedly cited an October 2018 Globe and Mail op-ed, in which Balsillie called Waterfront Toronto a “rogue public corporation,” and wrote that it “continues to weaponize ambiguity while making irreversible decisions that will have major negative effects” for Canadians. “Either you believe in Waterfront Toronto’s good work, or you don’t. But you can’t have it both ways,” Vaughan said.

In his letter, Balsillie wrote that Vaughan claimed during their meeting that the op-ed called on the three levels of government to “blow up Waterfront Toronto,” but that Vaughan had taken back the claim “when he failed to show evidence I ever presented that idea.”

Balsillie also said he and Vaughan had agreed that “Waterfront Toronto was mismanaging certain aspects of the process for the Quayside project.” Vaughan has been publicly supportive of the agency, tweeting in December 2018 that it “has done much for the economy and community of Toronto, and our Government will continue to support their vision.”

Also on Monday afternoon, ethics committee vice-chair Charlie Angus tweeted that Balsillie would be invited to testify before the group again, as he offered to do in the letter. Vaughan said he will attend the meeting if other parliamentary obligations allow.

Meanwhile, Waterfront Toronto is poised to tap veteran real-estate developer Stephen Diamond for its board of directors, according to a Globe and Mail report. The former chair, Helen Burstyn, was ousted, along with two other directors, when the provincial government fired its representatives following an Ontario auditor general report. The report indicated that Waterfront Toronto gave more information to Sidewalk Labs than other bidders before accepting submissions for the proposed development.

While the auditor general said the Request for Proposals (RFP) lasted just six weeks, and that the timeline was “too short”, Waterfront Toronto chief development officer Meg Davis told the committee on Thursday that the agency held a fair bid process running for 159 days. Davis said it was “the second-longest RFP we’ve ever run at Waterfront Toronto.”