I strongly oppose this bill…

I strongly oppose this bill. I do not support weakening or replacing our endangered species act. I do not support the idea of providing ways for companies and projects to bypass environmental protections and regulations - or indeed any other laws that they would normally need to conform with. I certainly do not support creating exempted areas of the province where such protections and regulations would not apply: both because this will have serious consequences for our environment and interconnected ecosystems, and because unregulated development and industry has been historically and repeatedly shown to have a range of negative effects on the health and well-being of people living nearby (from degradation of landscape and land quality to the risk of spills, contamination, harmful waste, etc.). This bill would also provide future governments and companies with a back-door means of violating the treaty rights of Indigenous peoples by exempting companies and projects from the need to properly consult with Indigenous communities, which I do not support under any circumstances.

Our environmental protections and procedures, and the laws and treaty agreements that mandate consultation with Indigenous nations, are all in place for a reason: implicitly, they acknowledge that, as a society, we cannot trust everyone to voluntarily do the right thing by undertaking extensive environmental assessments and consultations before beginning industrial projects, or by following regulations on disposal and clean-up during and after the project, and so our laws ensure that doing so is a mandatory legal duty rather than simply a polite request. Moreover, the existence of such requirements recognizes that we, as a society, are not all-knowing and all-seeing, and that serious risks to the environment and human health may not be fully appreciated or even known about until the proper risk assessments and procedures have been followed and the necessary research and consultation undertaken. The proposed bill contains wording around “trusted” projects and entities that will be exempted from such procedures, but the government’s trust in such a project or entity is meaningless if the result is that serious risks are not recognized until it’s too late. Moreover, by giving the government the power to designate parts of the province where such regulations could be summarily waived, or where certain projects are simply exempted, the proposed bill would be creating a dangerous and persistent loophole that could easily be exploited in the future and used by negligent entities or future governments to do significant and irreversible damage.

By the same token, the Endangered Species Act creates a blanket rule of protection and conservation, and places responsibility with the government to proactively plan for species recovery. By replacing this with a system wherein politicians are able to decide whether and where to implement protections on a case-by-case basis, and wherein there is no requirement for proactive conservation or recovery, the government would be divesting not only themselves, but also future governments of their responsibilities towards Ontario’s species at risk, and leaving vital conservation to the whims and priorities of whoever happens to be in power. This would be, in my strong opinion, deeply irresponsible and short-sighted in the extreme.

Finally, the wording of the bill ignores a fundamental and important truth: that ecosystems are interconnected, and cannot be treated in isolation. The wording around the designation of protection for individual animals and species takes an extremely limited view of a habitat as an individual creature or plant’s den or living site and immediate surroundings - but this ignores the fact that individual animals cannot survive in isolation, and that ecosystems survive and thrive only when they are made up of a diverse range of mutually connected individuals and species. For the same reason, the idea that parts of the province could be exempted from environmental regulation without this impacting the health and biodiversity of surrounding areas is simply impossible.

Our planet is in crisis. Carbon levels in the atmosphere are currently higher than they have been in over 3 million years (de la Vega, Chalk, et al, “Atmospheric CO2 during the Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period and the M2 glaciation,” Scientific Reports 10:11002 (2020), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67154-8 ). If it continues, the current rate of species extinction will make our own era into the sixth mass extinction event in earth’s history. The good news is that, because humans are causing these changes (rather than, say, an asteroid or massive volcanic activity, which respectively account for the two most recent mass extinctions - see https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facin…), we have the power to turn them around. Ontario’s huge, wonderful forests are crucial carbon sinks that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with vital oxygen. Our natural environment is not only a critical resource for Ontarians, but for the health of the planet. We should be increasing and strengthening environmental protections, not weakening them. Environmental risk assessments SHOULD be rigorous, and SHOULD take time, because they are absolutely, crucially important. No one should be exempt from taking proper care of our environment, in any part of the province or under any circumstances.

In conclusion, I believe the proposed bill 5 is not only inadvisable, but actively and seriously dangerous to the health and well-being of future generations. I vehemently oppose it.