RE: Comments on ERO #025…

RE: Comments on ERO #025-0730:
Proposed changes to provide flexibility for water taking activities

The Ontario Headwaters Institute, a charity that promotes watershed security, defined as healthy and resilient watersheds that protect regional ecological integrity, social well-being, and economic vitality,
expresses our grave concerns about this proposal. We urge that it be withdrawn and re-written.

Quite simply, the proposal on the Environmental Registry of Ontario is backwards.

As written, the proposal states that it is intended to “allow proponents to keep their projects moving, while maintaining regulatory oversight”.

In fact, this intention transfers permit conditions to a new permit holder without any evaluation (regulatory oversight) of their operational capabilities, and with no mention of if and/or how permit conditions might need to be revised where a permit has been suspended, cancelled or revoked due to past non-compliance.

This can even be applied to a new (implied) permit holder should they not register the acquisition of a property with a permit for up to one year following the purchase.

Both situations are not maintaining but rather abandoning regulatory oversight.

Worse yet, the proposed regulation appears to render a permit to take water transferable, moving water from being a common resource that must be protected under the doctrine of the public trust to being a transferable asset based on property ownership. Any such suggestion must be clearly renounced.

We believe the fix is an easy one, with relatively straight-forward editing that would extend all past permit conditions to any new land owner, for which the legal obligation must be included and actively acknowledged in the transfer of a deed.

The summary of a renewed proposal would thus shift 180 degrees, from “allowing proponents to keep their projects moving, while maintaining regulatory oversight”, to “ensuring that regulatory oversight for water is maintained (even) where properties with a permit to take water changes ownership”.

We are confident that reversing this proposal from its current focus to one that would ensure the continuation of the Ministry’s obligations to protect water while not making water a transferrable commodity would find favour with most stakeholders and the public at large.

Sincerely,

Andrew McCammon
Executive Director