I do not support the plan to…

I do not support the plan to consolidate the province’s 36 conservation authorities into seven regional conservation authorities. I agree with municipal leaders and conservation authority members, in particular the Hamilton Conservation Authority, who warn that merging into massive regions would significantly weaken local influence and reduce the ability to respond to community specific environmental needs. Proposed regions such as the Huron–Superior authority would stretch from Thunder Bay to the GTA, grouping highly diverse ecosystems and communities under one body. This and other proposed regions are too large and diverse for efficient watershed management, natural hazard response, and environmental stewardship.

Ontario’s current structure is watershed based which is a scientifically grounded model. Fragmenting this by merging unrelated watersheds into mega regions could weaken natural hazard management and undermine long standing watershed level planning frameworks. The large new regions will struggle to maintain consistent, high quality permitting and monitoring across widely different landscapes because the consolidation reduces access to local flood risk expertise and environmental assessment capacity. As climate change increases severe rain events, losing local expertise poses serious community safety risks.

Then there is the question of the necessity of the overhaul? As has been reported: “What’s broken? What are we fixing?” The changes do appear haphazard and lack clear justification. Bringing dozens of municipalities together could create administrative inefficiencies, not reduce them. Further, as the province has acknowledged, the new system and performance indicators are still being developed, leaving uncertainty around how governance, accountability, and oversight will work. This also begs the question, who pays for this new upper-tier governance layer?

In sum, the proposed merger weakens Ontario’s environmental protection system by reducing local expertise, limiting community representation, and creating operational challenges for municipalities and watershed management.