Southern Ontario has lost…

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019-6160

Comment ID

72104

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Southern Ontario has lost approximately 70% of its wetlands since 1970 and we can not afford to lose any more. Any attempt to "speed up" assessment and remove protections is folly given the wide variety of ecosystem services that wetlands provide. They are important in cleaning our water and precventing floods as well as providing homes for numerous endangered species. We cannot only protect isolated "significant" wetlands but rather we need to instead maintain a network of wetlands , both small and large, to maintain connectivity for ground and surface water movement and corridors for species to move between different habitats. These features appear to be lost in the current changes and there is a great potential that even when we protect large wetlands they will become further degraded due to this loos of connectivity. Please reconsider.