Regarding ERO # 025-0380: As…

Regarding ERO # 025-0380:

As a life-long Ontario resident, taxpayer and voter, and a proud and very concerned Canadian citizen, I cannot express strongly enough my dismay and opposition to Ontario Bill 5 - Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, and specifically the Proposed interim changes to the Endangered Species Act, 2007 and a proposal for the Species Conservation Act, 2025.

Environmental regulations aren’t useless roadblocks (“red tape”) put into place by a bunch of tree-hugging hippies to block economic growth. They are science-based rules implemented in a mature democracy to make sure the environment is protected to guarantee a sustainable economy for current and future generations. They exist specifically as a result of the cut-and-run development, industrial and resource extraction policies of the past that have resulted in devastated landscapes and economies. Examples includes boom-and-bust mining and logging towns (where taxpayers pick up the clean-up bill once industry leaves), agricultural dust bowls and communities where air, soil and water are contaminated with cancer-causing pollutants that sicken everyone, even eventually the rich who live in areas that will never be designated “special economic zones”.

Special economic zones, where environmental regulations (even the depauperate proposed Species Conservation Act) and regular people of Ontario no longer apply or have a say, respectively, would degrade or destroy essential (aka: need-to-have, not nice-to-have) habitat such as wetlands. Why should anyone care about wetlands? Because wetlands are critical to slow down water to prevent expensive flooding, and they filter water to improve water quality, meaning fewer algae blooms and less pollution in our rivers and lakes, including lakes in cottage country like Muskoka.

The current Ontario Endangered Species Act protects not just the animals and the holes they live in, or the plant and small patch of soil where its roots grow, but the greater habitat they need for survival. Like humans, other species need more than then the immediate space an individual occupies to survive and thrive as a population. By protecting larger natural areas and the air, water and soil they depend on, all other sorts of plants and animals, as well as soil, air and water, are protected - and all this directly enhances the quality of life for people and the economy in Ontario. Think pollinators, mosquito-eating bats, trees that reduce heat waves and give people a place to rejuvenate, wetland plants that clean water for people to drink and clean soil to grow fruits and vegetables that feed people.

It must not be forgotten that critical to Ontario’s economy is clean and farmable soil. Ontario still (but for how long?) has the best farmland in all of Canada and we can grow just about everything Ontarians want to eat – which means we don’t have to import as much from the US. But only if these lands remain farmland and are not lost forever, paved under additional, counter-productive 400-series highways and uncontrolled urban sprawl and industrial development.

Also critical to Ontario’s economy? Manufacturing. This government should be aware that many of the province’s leading manufacturers – including the auto sector – located to Ontario precisely because of robust environmental protections that allowed for access to clean water critical for the automobile assembly processes. They, and other major employers in other sectors (tech for example), also located to (or stayed in) Ontario because of a healthy and productive workforce and high quality of life, something that cannot be separated from a clean and flourishing environment (clean air, water, and soil and natural spaces and places to recreate and to support their mental health).

This Ontario government, if anything, should strengthen environmental protection and stakeholder consultation, rather than green-light uncontrolled and undemocratic degradation, urban sprawl and contamination, all of which will result in a reduced quality of life for the Ontario public, and the Ontario economy – something that this government said during the recent election was their number one priority.

Short-term and short-sighted grabs to develop woodlands, wetlands and prime farmland, and to recklessly extract natural resources at the expense of the environment and the rights of First Nations and of non-First Nations local inhabitants, will enrich a small number of individuals and companies, but in the long-term it will make Ontario poorer and weaker. This has always been the end result of unregulated, unsustainable development. This is in addition to the irreversible impacts of greater carbon emissions from developing northern Ontario peatlands.

In a time of the US Trump Administration’s tariffs, and actions that are similarly rolling back environmental protection as well as civil liberties, the more Ontario protects and promotes a healthy environment and a robust democracy (where cabinet is accountable to the electorate, not lobbyists/donors), the more attractive Ontario will be to corporate, financial, industrial and manufacturing investors, and THAT is what will protect and unleash the Ontario economy.

Emulating Trump’s policies as outlined in Bill 5 and associated new and amended legislation will NOT achieve this, instead Ontario will become in more and more in form and function like a 51st US state.

If Premier Ford and the PC majority government wanted the best for all Ontarians they were elected to represent, they should halt Bill 5 and not put Ontario up for sale. Premier Ford and his government need to remember that Ontarians elected them to a third term because Doug Ford promised to BEAT Donald Trump, not to BE Donald Trump.