To: Mr. Yurek, Ontario…

To: Mr. Yurek,
Ontario Minister of Environtnent

I have been an Ontario citizen since 1979. It was with great concern that I learned about your goverment’s proposed changes to our province’s environmental protection legislation via your proposed Bill 132.

What is described in Bill 132 , Schedules 9 and 16, would seem to be a loosening and weakening of protection of the water, land and air which you, your children and grandchildren inhabit, and which the life that supports their lives inhabit.... and will inhabit in the decades coming.

Though the “stream-lining” of reporting, oversight, accountability and effective levels of penalty incentives may appear to be good for the “bottom line” of polluters and their businesses, the reduction or removal of environmental protections will add to the further degradation of our ecosystem. This will surely have negative consequences for our future generations’ and, ironically, on our economic system as well.

I invite you and your colleagues to take a longer view, informed both by the mounting scientific evidence and by compassion for future generations.

Further more, I respectfully request that the public be given better notice of public hearings, and that they be given more time to study and respond to these very complex issues. Thirty days of under-publicized hearings is inadequate.

The citizens of Ontario will thank you for your wise deliberation of priorities in these times of increasing climate changes. Your decisions in legislating will make a difference.

Thank you for this opportunity to express my thoughts on this matter.