Species Conservation Act,…

Species Conservation Act, 2025would strip protection altogether from almost all of the critical habitat protected by the Endangered Species Act, 2007, reducing the definition of “habitat” to tiny slivers of land—the immediate “dwelling place” of an endangered animal and the immediate “root zone” of an endangered plant. If adopted, this change would doom endangered and threaten species to extinction. Protecting merely the den of an endangered animal is too narrow to protect it from the risk of extinction.

Unlike the Endangered Species Act, 2007, which prohibits any activities that would damage or destroy habitat, the Species Conservation Act, 2025 would require only that those destroying habitat register that the destruction is happening. Outright prohibitions would be limited to situations where the proposed project by itself would likely wipe out a species in Ontario. Even if “registration” comes
with conditions with regard to impact mitigation or direction to construct artificial “replacement” habitat, allowing landowners to destroy habitat outright would mean extinction or extirpation for many species. The only way to reliably protect habitat—and the endangered and threatened species that rely on it—is to prohibit outright the activities that would destroy them.

Unlike the Endangered Species Act, 2007, which designates the legal determination of which species are endangered, threatened, extirpated or of special concern by Committee on the Status of Species at Risk , the Species Conservation Act, 2025, would make that determination an arbitrary political decision. The government could arbitrarily refuse to recognize in the regulations that a species is at-risk at all.

Bill 5 also expressly abandons any attempt to achieve the recovery of endangered, threatened or extirpated species. Schedules 2 and 10 of Bill 5 would cause much more harm than that by stripping recognition from most critical habitat and eliminating most meaningful prohibitions on destruction of the tiny slivers that are recognized. For these reasons I request this proposed legislation is withdrawn in its entirety.