I emphatically oppose this…

I emphatically oppose this proposal. I highly disagree that it will improve conservation authorities and how the environment is managed and protected. Instead:

1) Local CA boards will be replaced by one regional board. Each CA’s board is made up of municipalities within its jurisdiction, for example the SCRCA Board consists of representatives from 17 municipalities that play a role in decision making and local watershed management. The new Lake Erie Regional CA would consist of 81 municipalities with only 10-15 regional board members. This will ultimately erode local involvement and decision making.
2) Generate substantial transition costs — including human-resources integration, governance restructuring, IT migration and policy harmonization — that would divert resources from front-line service delivery.
3) Create a geographically vast and administratively complex entity, joining northern, rural and fast-growing southern municipalities throughout the province with little shared watershed connection or economic alignment.
4) Species at Risk diversity and threats are not equal across Ontario and require local level action, resources and funding to halt range and abundance declines. Securing funding for regions of this scale to conduct this work will become near impossible.
5) All changes will be in place by January 2027; this pace is not compatible with the intensity and scale of proposed changes.

Overall this proposal only seeks to make politicians lives easier by applying a cookie-cutter approach to environmental management and conservation, while making the logistics of implementing restoration and/or protection actions impossible with CAs now covering such large geographical ranges. Local context means everything in effective environmental efforts from its conception to continued management and monitoring in the future. This proposal seeks to silence so many local voices, in particular Indigenous ones, and will result in job losses and financial burden to restructure no matter what promises the government makes.