As an Ontario citizen and…

As an Ontario citizen and voter I am writing this to express my opposition to the provincial government’s proposed changes to the Ontario Wetland Evaluation System (OWES). I am a Biologist and Ecologist and deal daily with field data that contributes to wetland characterization (and to OWES evaluations) and with conservation/protection issues involving wetlands. I am very familiar with the OWES system for southern Ontario.
While it can be a useful exercise to periodically examine a program like OWES to ask where improvements might be achieved, I find the proposed changes misguided as they seem to be at cross-purposes with the intention of OWES, that is, to protect wetlands and thereby, their functions.
Unfortunately, the provincial government has the misconception that the OWES program is holding up the construction of affordable homes in southern Ontario. The OWES program is NOT a barrier to Ontario’s housing affordability crisis. In truth, OWES functions as intended, protecting important wetlands - parts of our valuable natural infrastructure that protects citizens from flooding, erosion and maintains our water quality - from destruction. Yes, OWES does stand as a barrier to dangerous development that would threaten our environmental health, the ecosystem services we enjoy and consequently our personal health and well-being. But OWES is not a barrier to good development.
To date, wetlands in southern Ontario are well-defined, their locations are known and are clearly mapped. The OWES process for evaluating wetlands and designating the most significant ones at a provincial scale and has been arrived at thoughtfully, through the contributions of many biology, ecology, conservation and planning professionals, with the good of Ontarians in mind. The OWES designation of provincially significant wetlands (PSWs) is transparent. If prospective developers respect these features and our Provincial Policy Statement (PPS) directing that PSWs are protected and may not be developed, their development applications would speed along as they wish. It is only when developers motivated by profits and greed want to contravene the rules set out in the PPS and damage or eliminate wetlands that applications are held up. There is plenty of land for development (outside of the Greenbelt, for that matter) and there are so few wetlands remaining on the landscape (due to massive losses over the last 100 years) that properly planned development, honestly planned to benefit society and conducted in conjunction with the public’s wish to protect our natural heritage, would be easy.
There are several aspects of the proposed changes to OWES that are particularly problematic:

• The proposed removal of MNRF from dealing with OWES is short-sighted.
o Since PSWs are features protected under the PPS there must be a single provincial authority that oversees and maintains the system.
o Mapping of PSWs must be maintained as a single authoritative layer and overseen by a single responsible body so they are not question able or debatable.
o The status of wetlands under the PPS cannot be left to ad hoc decisions by individual municipalities (most of whom lack expertise).
o There is still wetland field work that needs to be done as all wetlands are not evaluated and this work must be done to a consistent and high standard upheld by a provincial authority like MNRF.
o Older mapping and evaluations will eventually require updates, held to the provincial standard.
o While there are many trained and certified wetland evaluators currently, they are not going to live forever so new evaluators must be trained and their training must be standardized, because again, PSWs are protected by provincial policy.
o MNRF has built a substantial body of knowledge and experience on wetlands in Ontario and to suddenly remove them from that portfolio is wasteful.

• The proposal to stop recognizing wetland complexes is highly mis-guided.
o In many cases, clusters of wetlands are hydrologically connected (through the water table) and work together as a whole. These clusters of wetlands are called a complex. This is science-based knowledge.
o When one part of the complex is damaged or removed (e.g., paved over or drained) the whole wetland is impaired. It may no longer be able to absorb flood waters or runoff, or filter surface water. An impaired wetland’s biodiversity may be reduced so it is no longer resilient to disturbance (like climate change or urbanization) and it may no longer be able to cool air temperatures, or participate fully in the water cycle, or provide health and wellness benefits to neighbourhood residents.
o The proposal to stop recognizing wetland complexes is akin to removing half of a dam across a river – half a dam just doesn’t do its job.
o Wetlands of a complex work together, that’s just they way they are, regardless of whether developers like it or not.

• The proposal to remove Species at Risk (SAR) from the scoring scheme in wetland evaluations fails to reflect the true ecological value of wetlands and undermines protection of Species at Risk under Ontario’s Endangered Species Act (ESA).
o To protect wetland Species at Risk under the ESA, their wetland habitat must be protected.
o Modern ecological knowledge has moved far beyond the simple protection of individual SAR bodies, and now understands that habitat protection is essential.
o If wetland habitat of SAR is not protected, then the ESA will fail.
o SAR should remain in the PSW scoring scheme.

• Downloading decision-making on wetlands to municipalities puts an unreasonable burden on municipalities and taxpayers.
o Almost no municipalities (especially lower tier municipalities) have the expertise to handle decision-making around wetlands and PSW assessments.
o Municipal staff already have heavy workloads and to require them to take on additional responsibilities around wetlands and whether wetlands qualify as PSWs or not is unreasonable. This is particularly unfair when municipalities don’t have existing ecological expertise or experience.
o If municipalities purchase expertise (through hiring additional expert staff or through consultant contracts) taxpayers will ultimately bear the costs of development (rather than the developers be paying for their wetland-related arguments).
o If municipalities (especially small municipalities) cannot afford to purchase expertise and need to handle the additional workload in-house, then development applications will clearly take much longer to process as staff try to acquire new knowledge and as development applications with wetland issues wait in line behind other municipal business.
o The bottom line is, if municipalities are given more work to do, that extra work will be slower, not faster. This is obviously not the way to get affordable housing built faster.

Given the above substantial problems with the proposal to change OWES, I urge the provincial government to withdraw the proposal to change OWES from Bill 23.

If this government truly wants to decrease processing time for development applications then it should instead, provide more support to MNRF and better funding of the OWES program. This would allow staff to fill in evaluation gaps, update mapping and older evaluations, complete complexing exercises to better reflect the functions of wetlands and bring wetland concepts in line with current scientific knowledge, train more evaluators and respond in a timely fashion to questions about OWES from practitioners.

If MNRF involvement with OWES is too much of a burden then this government might consider strengthening the long-standing working relationship between MNRF and Conservation Authorities (CAs), who have worked together to protect wetlands since the inception of OWES. CA staff have plenty of field and OWES expertise developed in concert with MNRF over the years and have a good understanding of wetlands and hydrology in their jurisdictions. CAs also have high work standards, excellent mapping capabilities and strong relationships with their municipalities. CAs have good networks that can be successful at streamlining development processes while protecting environment.

Regards
23 Nov. 2022