Bill 5, particularly due to…

Bill 5, particularly due to the special economic zones, should be rejected. The removal of legal protections for species at risk, farmlands, indigenous rights, public safety and privacy, heritage, employment, and workplace safety is abhorrent. These protections should be strengthened, not removed. The transfer of power out of the hands of the people and into the hands of only the executive branch of the government is unacceptable. I’m a wildlife conservation biologist that supports clean energy, the rule of law, and safe workplaces. I am gravely concerned about the negative impacts this bill would have on my livelihood and the conditions my fellow citizens will be subjected to without the protections of the Endangered Species Act, labour laws, health and safety laws, traffic and speeding laws, laws that prevent trespassing on private property, and the treaties with Indigenous Nations. We need clean energy, like solar energy, to reduce the negative impacts we already have on the environment while powering the modern necessities we have in our lives, like electricity and running water in our homes, more efficiently with sources that are easily renewable. We need rare species, and the habitats those rare species use to forage, find cover, and travel, not only because the species deserve to survive in their own right, but because they contribute to the air we breathe and water we drink. Government cabinet ministers do not understand the status of species at risk better than scientists, so should not be able to reject that statuses the scientists have identified – status assessments should remain science-based. If an area is truly so significant that the benefit to the economy is demonstrably more important than the species at risk that live there, then there is already a process to obtain permits to develop that also ensures that there is an overall benefit to the species by doing things like removing individual animals before work commences, doing work outside of critical periods of the year for important wildlife activities (e.g nesting), and creating/restoring suitable habitat elsewhere. Improvements that could be made to the Endangered Species Act to make it more efficient could be returning the power to grant permits to government experts rather than requiring each permit to go to the Minister and reducing the amount of time it takes to approve permits for folks working to recover a species at risk, but folks working to harm a species at risk should still have stringent permitting requirements requiring review by a large variety of people. Endangered Species Act protections should return to what they were in 2007, not be further dismantled. We need labour laws and health and safety laws to protect workers and maintain safety, particularly for jobs in the construction and development field that are already relatively high risk. We need traffic and speeding laws to protect workers and anyone near any vehicles that have the ability to cause severe harm. Everyone with private property deserves to have an expectation that trespassing is not permitted. Our society operates under a rule of law to maintain order and respect treaties – allowing only one branch of government to create special economic zones that are exempt from provincial and municipal laws and undermine Indigenous sovereignty and their constitutional right to free, prior, and informed consent is undemocratic.