Thank you for the…

Thank you for the opportunity to provide comments on the 10th Year Review of Ontario’s Endangered Species Act: Discussion Paper. I am submitting this feedback in my professional capacity at the Rebanks Family Chair in Pollinator Conservation at the University of Guelph, with over 20 years of experience researching the behaviour, ecology and conservation of bees and other pollinators around the world.

Loss of biodiversity, and the key ecosystem services associated with biodiversity, is a key issue that we face as a global society. Species at risk (SAR) represent a small fraction of the total number of species that we initially recognized, named and then had sufficient long-term data to be able to determine they have undergone sufficiently serious declines to be listed as a conservation concern. As such, protecting SAR is a key responsibility we have as stewards of our landscapes.

Having read this discussion paper, I was pleased to see some rhetoric echoing my sentiments above (for example, “The government is committed to ensuring that the Endangered Species Act provides stringent protections for species at risk, continuing to work with stakeholders and Indigenous peoples to improve its effectiveness, …”). However, other ideas and language expressed in the discussion paper seem to open the way to increase the time taken for a species to be included on the Species at Risk in Ontario List, to move away from species-specific recovery strategies (to more generic landscape approaches), and to move towards ways in which developments could be granted that render harm to SAR provided mitigations are in place in another location. These appear to be ways to erode protections that currently exist for SAR under the Ontario Endangered Species Act (ESA). As a society, we should not be looking at ways to reduce the effectiveness of the ESA, rather looking at ways to use it to better protect those SAR already protected by it, and to further accelerate the slow and cumbersome process of getting conservation priority species assessed and listed (through the Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario (COSSARO) and the Species at Risk Program Advisory Committee (SARPAC)).

Areas of focus 1 – Landscape Approaches
Landscape approaches to “support a proposed activity while also ensuring or improving outcomes for species at risk” should not be necessarily considered as an adequate replacement for species-specific assessments. The current ESA contains the tools to deploy a strategic broad-scale (landscape) approach, and these could be considered for the benefit of multiple SARs that in the same places and are subject to the same environmental threats. In reality there the degree of ecological niche overlap between the 243 SARs listed in Ontario is low, and specific ecological needs of each SAR need to be fully understood to develop effective species-specific recovery plans for each. In reality this is expensive, and should receive additional funding to allow quicker development of the recovery plans for the 103 SARs for which none currently exist.

Areas of focus 2 – Listing Process and Protections for Species at Risk
The timelines for public notice before a new species is listed on the Species at Risk in Ontario List should not be increased. Communications and outreach to relevant stakeholders, Indigenous communities and organizations, and knowledge holders could, and should, be improved.
There should not be a “different approach or alternative to automatic species and habitat protections”. It is concerning to see here that the document is proposing allowing “ministerial discretion on whether to apply, remove or temporarily delay protections for a threatened or endangered species, or its habitat”. If such discretions were exercised this would effectively make the SAR designation functionally useless.
The process regarding assessment and classification of a species by the COSSARO can be improved by making the selection criteria and membership of the committees more transparent and to provide greater secretariat support to allow technical experts in the committee to undertake the actual conservation assessment as rigorously as possible based on the evidence base. This would, if anything, speed up the current slow pace of assessments in this process.

Areas of focus 3 – Species Recovery Policies and Habitat Regulations
No changes should be made to the legislated timeline to develop any Government Response Statements (GRSs). The focus should instead be to improve coordination between these documents and the recovery strategies to enhance protection for SARs. Similarly, no changes should be made to the legislated timeline for conducting a review of progress towards the protection and recovery of species.
Evaluate the efficacy of general habitat protections to species recovery, and reconsider the use of the habitat regulation in circumstances where more stringent habitat protection is required, in keeping with lessons learned from critical habitat protection in the US.

Areas of focus 4 – Authorization Processes
The proposal to allow payments into a conservation fund dedicated to species at risk conservation, or allow conservation banking “in lieu of activity-based requirements” strikes me as deeply concerning. This seems to be an offset payment scheme to simply ignore the potential harm that proposed development or activity could do to SAR without considering the ramifications. This should not be considered as an alternative to impact assessment of proposed developments/ activities during the planning phase prior to permissions being granted.
Where conditional development authorizations are granted it is vital that extensive, long-term monitoring is implemented to determine the trajectory of SAR populations at that site, and more widely, to determine the extent to which authorizations are working, and where and when they need to be modified to enhance protection goals.
Implement authorizations in the context of comprehensive habitat protection regimes for each species (or groups of species), rather than in the current isolated approach.

Final overall comments:
Proposals to modify the ESA outlined in this paper here as discussion questions should not be adopted. The focus of this review should be to improve the way in which the ESA is implemented to protect and support SARs, where possible through greater integration of recovery strategies for different SARs (that could bring potential cost savings) and enhanced communications with diverse stakeholder groups.