I am contacting you…

I am contacting you representing the Ruffed Grouse Society of Canada's North Shore Chapter. Our chapter has been in existence more than 35 years and has been working with the Long Point Region Conservation Authority to enhance early successional habitat for ruffed grouse and other forest wildlife.
Typically, our initiatives involve completing work on LPRCA property, to provide demonstrations for other land owners and make the CA forest better for ruffed grouse. With the current thinking by many that cutting trees is a bad thing, this has led to a loss of this type of habitat, making our work even more important.
It is our fear that with the loss of local control, it is our committee's concern it will make things more difficult to get approvals. For instance, while the CA board and personnel locally believe in our cause, if there was a larger CA area, people from other areas, and cities, may not understand. In addition, our organization is a hunter's group and appreciate that our work can be done on LPRCA land where hunting is allowed. Hunting policies vary on CAs across the province, and while we recognize your government is pro-hunting, it would be easy to ban hunting on CAs by a future government with the stroke of a pen.
Over our committee's time in existence, we have done work on provincial lands with MNR. More recently, this process has become so filled with red tape that we haven't completed work - which we fund - on provincial land in some time. Logic dictates that the same could easily happen with a larger regional conservation authority. History shows this is fact, not a theory. To prove this, I would refer you to the Fraser Institute study on Amalgamating Municipal Governments in Ontario. This study actually used municipalities in the LPRCA watershed - Norfolk and Haldimand - and found that the changes that killed regional government and created the two counties ended up in higher costs to taxpayers.
In closing, if the concern is the planning controls of CAs, please consider separating this from the authority operations, moving it to the proposed regional agency, and leaving the other functions of CAs in local control.