Re: ERO #025-1257 I’m…

Re: ERO #025-1257

I’m writing to oppose the proposal to merge Ontario’s 36 conservation authorities into seven giant regional authorities. This isn’t modernization it’s a downgrade. It strips away the local knowledge and accountability that actually keep people safe, especially as weather gets more extreme.

People want growth, and many of us support denser, smarter growth. But growth only works when the underlying systems of water, flooding, erosion control are managed close to the ground. If you centralize all of that into a massive regional structure, you lose the precision and responsiveness that make safe, resilient development possible. Bigger bureaucracy doesn’t equal better outcomes. It just puts more distance between decision-makers and the actual conditions on the land.

And the timing is especially bad. On the U.S. side of the Great Lakes, federal protections for wetlands and smaller waterways keep getting rolled back. The Trump-era EPA has already weakened the definition of “Waters of the United States,” removing Clean Water Act protections from huge areas of wetlands and tributaries. Those upstream waters are what filter pollution before it reaches the Great Lakes. When the U.S. loosens those safeguards, the pressure shifts onto Canada to hold the line.

So instead of reinforcing Ontario’s watershed protection, this proposal does the opposite. It dilutes local expertise and replaces it with a centralized structure that’s easier to influence politically and more likely to prioritize speed over safety. That is the wrong response when the Great Lakes are getting more vulnerable, not less.

If the province actually wants efficiency, that can be achieved with shared services, standardized digital systems, or stable funding, not by blowing up the governance model that has worked for decades.

Please withdraw this proposal. Keep conservation decisions local, accountable, and tied to the actual watersheds people live in. This is not the moment to weaken protections around the Great Lakes, and this restructuring heads exactly in that direction.