I oppose -- strenuously and…

I oppose -- strenuously and unambiguously – the Ontario government's proposed amalgamation and "consolidation" of Ontario's 36 Conservation Authorities.

The whole point of our internationally praised CAs is that they bring local expertise and responsiveness to natural watersheds -- not arbitrarily clumps of land carved up by bureaucrats.

Conservation Authorities (CAs) are a valued local presence that provide stewardship, parks, trails and educational activities, in addition to flood management and regulatory functions, essential to keeping Ontarians safe. And although I live in a city, I am writing in solidarity with the farmers who feed us all. (I now eat almost entirely locally.) Local Conservation Authority staff experts help farmers address climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological practices on their farms.

A regional CA model is anti-democratic. It will diminish the partnership between rural Municipalities -- your electoral base, as it happens – and the Province. It will distance municipally elected representatives from important environmental decisions and give more decision-making power to Queen's Park. I am concerned that local tax dollars will not go to improving local environment and water. Important environmental safeguards for communities will be weakened, if not abandoned.

If the Ontario government wants to act responsibily, it should:

● Maintain local decision-making boards
● Ensure municipal funds are allocated to their local watersheds
● Ensure environmental safeguards are protected
● Ensure that assets are retained by the local conservation authority, which has invested 80 years in securing and protecting these community resources
● Work collaboratively with CAs to build capacity and support local solutions to restore the health and resiliency of watersheds
● Increase provincial funding to CAs to ensure that they can carry out the work the province requires of them.

Torontonians like me, who were around in the early 1990s know all about Conservative amalgamation: our city has never recovered from the damage that Mike Harris's amalgamation did to the city -- amalgamation that the Conservatives pushed through even though it was soundly rejected in a city-wide referendum.

Nor is this the Ford government's first assault on Ontario's Conservation Authorities: amongst other reprehensible actions, the government has already removed CAs' ability to review development applications for environmental impacts, including those on wetlands and species at risk.

Then there is the government's ominous claim that the proposed consolidation will "better align the work of CAs with provincial priorities." We all know what Doug Ford's government's priorities are: enabling rich developers to get richer, at any cost to the environment, and building polluting and destructive highways by bypassing environmental assessments -- I am thinking especially of the proposed Highway 413, which will severely pollute and otherwise damage the magnificent and important Humber River watershed, which is home to an astonishing biodiversity, and which in multifarious ways improves life for millions of Ontarians, including west-end Torontonians like me.

As for the government's claim that the consolidation of CAs will "free up resources for front-line service delivery to help protect communities": please don't insult us. If the government wants to "free up resources," it can stop pissing away our tax dollars on lawsuits it incurs through its persecution of cyclists, then on legal appeals when it loses those cases (Cycle Toronto et al. vs The Attorney General of Ontario), and through its refusal to protect Ontarians of the present and future generations against the catastrophic effects of climate change (Mathur et al. vs Ontario).