I absolutely do not support…

I absolutely do not support the proposal to only require the streamlined Environmental Impact Assessment process for highway, rail and electricity corridors. While I respect and understand that transportation and energy are essential services, these developments can still have severe impacts on valuable and rapidly disappearing natural areas that also provide a slew of essential benefits to all life.

Natural areas across Ontario, especially in southern Ontario, are already severely fragmented. This has devastating impacts for species that require large areas for breeding (area-sensitive species) or those that must traverse different types of habitats at different times of the- year (e.g., turtles that breed in one habitat and winter in another, many of which are severely threatened by road mortality). Ensuring connectivity and minimizing fragmentation of natural areas will be of particular importance as climate change drives shifts in species' geographic ranges, forcing them to be able to move to regions with more suitable conditions under the new climatic regime. Continuing to fragment remaining natural areas without a comprehensive investigation of what the impacts will be and all possible options to minimize those impacts is careless and will only exacerbate the ongoing and accelerating biodiversity crisis we are facing in Ontario and across the world.

Furthermore, just because a project may not be an expansive several-hundred-kilometer does not mean that it will not have devastating impacts on the habitat it would impact. The controversial Bradford Bypass, which would destroy extremely sensitive and irreplaceable wetland habitat in the Holland Marsh, comes to mind. Despite the relatively short distance to be covered by the proposed highway - spanning only 16.5 km - experts have expressed serious concerns about its impact on the sensitive wetland habitat, several species-at-risk, soil carbon storage, and Indigenous cultural values. The federal government has recently recognized that their previous decision not to pursue a federal impact assessment was unreasonable, highlighting the importance of ensuring proper public consultation, the significant impacts this project would have and the importance of ensuring that all of these impacts are properly considered when deciding whether the project should proceed. For the record, I strongly believe that it should not.

In any case, I will assert again my opposition to this proposal on the basis that small development corridors can still have severe environmental impacts due to habitat fragmentation and if they cross particularly sensitive or rare ecosystems (as in the case of the Bradford By-pass). While transportation and energy are essential services, so too are the myriad of benefits provided by natural areas and these services cannot not be overlooked in the name of convenience.