I am writing to you because…

I am writing to you because I am shocked that the new law the Ontario government has claimed is about “protecting Ontario” is actually designed to do just the opposite. Given the Premier’s commitments in this year’s election, I hope you are as surprised and angry as I am about what’s actually in Bill 5, and that you will speak out, and vote against it, so it doesn’t pass.

While Bill 5 is called “Protecting Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act” it would serve Ontario up on a platter by giving Premier Ford and his Cabinet Trump-like authoritarian powers to immunize anyone he likes from all municipal and provincial laws. That includes “friends” and donors who will line up for these special privileges. Far from “protecting” Ontario, Bill 5 would allow all provincial and municipal laws to be violated wherever the Cabinet decides. The Bill would also repeal the Endangered Species Act altogether, ending almost all endangered species protection. As a result sprawl-developers and even U.S. companies, can eradicate our rarest plants of animals and their habitat with impunity.

Just like the U.S. President’s false claims that his tariffs against Canada are about reducing deaths from fentanyl, the Premier’s framing of Bill 5 as a response to that “economic force” is the thinnest of false pretexts for a massive—and unprecedented attack on the rule of law with no real connection to that problem.

I have grave concerns about many of the other destructive measures included in Bill 5, and I hope to follow up with further, separate letters concentrating on those issues. Suffice it to say, for now, that most provisions of Schedules 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Bill 5 will do nothing to protect Ontario from U.S. threats of economic coercion and annexation.

However, my focus in this letter will be on the most obviously extreme and dangerous proposals in this omnibus bill: the laws which would effectively end provincial protection for species at risk, and those which would effectively end the rule of law in Ontario by granting politicians the unfettered power to exempt their friends’ businesses, properties and projects from any (or all) of Ontario’s laws. These proposals should be abandoned in their entirety, not just because of their harmful side-effects, but because they would undermine, rather than advance, any genuine effort to protect Ontario.