Each spring, the Piping…

Each spring, the Piping Plover makes an extraordinary journey back to Ontario’s Great Lakes. After months on warm southern beaches, these tiny birds fly thousands of kilometers to nest on the wild stretches of sand that line our freshwater shores.
One of their last strongholds is Wasaga Beach — the world’s longest freshwater beach — home to one of Ontario’s most unique and fragile coastal dune ecosystems. Wasaga Beach Provincial Park is an 1,844-hectare recreational class park, located in the Town of Wasaga Beach. It was established in 1959 to protect both nature and public access to one of Ontario’s natural gems.
The changes proposed here will carve up large parts of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park to permit a risky development scheme that push out the Piping Plover — and curtail the public’s right to protected natural spaces. This is a precedent that destroys protection .
What’s is proposed at Wasaga Beach isn’t a typical local planning fight. To push this development through, Ontario plans to amend the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act — a law that was designed to keep our parks safe from commercial development.
If Ontario carves out sections of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park for roads, real estate, and tourism, not only will it remove parts of a precious and rare ecosystem; it will also pave the way for converting other protected areas into commercial areas. The proposed change is no small loophole — it’s a means for converting other public, protected lands. It sets a dangerous precedent: our parks are no longer guaranteed safe havens for nature.
I urge the government to rethink its plans to take back precious public parkland for commercial development.