The new Species Conservation…

The new Species Conservation Act would strip away real protections for at-risk species and their habitats. Science and recovery planning are being replaced by an empty process that can’t protect our wildlife.

Bill 5 would repeal Ontario's Endangered Species Act, 2007 (see Part IX of Schedule 10) marking the end of most meaningful provincial protections for endangered, threatened and special concern species in Ontario.

Far from helping to protect Ontario, the new law offered in its place, the so-called “Species Conservation Act, 2025” would, if enacted in anything like its current form, declare open season on Ontario species that are listed as Endangered, Threatened or of Special Concern.

It clearly is designed to strip protection altogether from almost all of the critical habitat protected by the Endangered Species Act, 2007, reducing the definition of “habitat” to tiny slivers of land—the immediate “dwelling place” of an endangered animal (such as around dens or nests) and the immediate “root zone” of an endangered plant. If adopted, this change would doom endangered and threaten species to extinction. Protecting the den of an endangered animal (e.g. the southern American Badger) won’t keep it alive if the larger grasslands, forests or wetlands it depends on for food are paved for sprawl.

Even the tiny fraction of habitat recognized as such under the new law would not be off-limits for destruction. Unlike the Endangered Species Act, 2007, which prohibits any activities that would damage or destroy habitat, the Species Conservation Act, 2025 would require only that those destroying habitat register that the destruction is happening. Outright prohibitions would be limited to situations where the proposed project by itself would likely wipe out a species in Ontario. Even if “registration” under the Species Conservation Act, 2025 comes with conditions with regard to impact mitigation or direction to construct artificial “replacement” habitat, allowing landowners to destroy habitat outright would mean extinction or extirpation for many species. The idea that typical (even species-specific) mitigation measures (e.g. stormwater ponds, snow fencing) mitigate the effects of destructive activities enough to preserve habitat values is usually speculative, and quite often entirely implausible. For example, stormwater retention ponds worsen the warming of adjacent rivers and streams associated with residential, commercial or industrial sprawl. The idea that existing habitats can just be replaced elsewhere, let alone using any standardized approach, is wishful thinking generally not based on scientific evidence. The only way to reliably protect habitat—and the endangered and threatened species that rely on it—is to prohibit outright the activities that would destroy them.

Unlike the Endangered Species Act, 2007, which puts the legal determination of which species are endangered, threatened, extirpated or of special concern in the hands of the arms-length Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario, the Species Conservation Act, 2025, would make that recognition arbitrary political decision. The government could arbitrarily refuse to recognize in the regulations that a species is at-risk at all.

Bill 5 also expressly proposes to abandon any attempt to achieve the recovery of endangered, threatened or extirpated species. But Schedules 2 and 10 of Bill 5 would cause much more harm than that by stripping recognition from most critical habitat and eliminating most meaningful prohibitions on destruction of the tiny slivers that are recognized. These two schedules would drive many of Ontario’s endangered and threatened species, over time, to extinction or extirpation. There is simply no case to be made that such a broad and indiscriminate sacrifice of habitat and wildlife is somehow a targeted measure to resist U.S. attacks. Endangered species aren’t standing in the way of higher housing output or the creation of new industrial workplaces. In fact, it has been well established in Ontario and throughout the world that protecting biodiversity and advancing economic development can occur together. For example, Ontario built a massive new Georgian Bay section of Highway 400 highway through endangered species habitat. That project used innovative underpasses and overpasses, coupled with fencing that was able to protect rare species and human lives from car-wildlife impacts. That project was win-win and underscores the effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act, 2007.