Last Tuesday, the Government of Ontario presented its proposed budget.  The Minister of Finance, the Honourable Dwight Duncan, tabled for first reading in the legislature Bill 55 – Strong Action for Ontario Act (Budget Measures), 2012.  This budget bill is effectively the mother-of-all pieces of omnibus legislation.

Bill 55 amends 69 different statutes in its schedules.  For example, many environmentally significant laws that are administered by the Ministry of Natural Resources are proposed to be amended.  These laws include the Endangered Species Act, the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, the Public Lands Act, the Crown Forest Sustainability Act, and the Niagara Escarpment Planning and Development Act.  Laws such as these are prescribed under the Environmental Bill of Rights, 1993 (EBR).

Normally, when the government proposes to amend legislation that is prescribed under the EBR, it would post a proposal notice on the Environmental Registry and solicit public comments for a minimum of 30 days.  The government then considers the public comments and makes a decision.  These steps help make for a transparent and accountable process.

However, budgets bills are specifically exempt from the posting and public consultation requirements of the EBR.  Moreover, the Ministry of Finance is not prescribed under the EBR either.  As a result, the public does not have the same opportunities to contribute to decision making when a number of environmentally significant laws are changed in a budget bill.

I wrote about a very similar situation in my last Annual Report regard the use of omnibus legislation: “At best, using omnibus legislation to amend environmental laws complicates the EBR process. At worst, it can obstruct the public’s right to participate in environmental decision making.”

Toronto, January 10, 2012 – The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario says the Government of Ontario must come up with a new strategy to stem the continuing decline in Ontario’s species and natural spaces.  In a special report released today, “Biodiversity: A Nation’s Commitment, an Obligation for Ontario,” Gord Miller says unless Ontario and all other provinces take action, the international commitments made by the federal government will be meaningless.

“The Ontario government did adopt a Biodiversity Strategy in 2005,” says Gord Miller. “Unfortunately, it expired in 2010, and the government has so far chosen not to adopt an updated plan.  Our government cannot avoid its obligation,” says Miller, “to guide Ontario’s response to this urgent crisis.”

In 2010, Canada met with almost 200 nations in Nagoya, Japan and agreed on 20 biodiversity conservation targets that should be achieved by 2020.   But the Commissioner says most of the constitutional responsibility for meeting these targets lies with Ontario and the other provincial governments. “Efforts to halt the loss of biodiversity must be implemented at the provincial level if they are to be effective. And Ontario won’t be able to do that unless it has a new Biodiversity Strategy.”

In Ontario, the most significant threats to the province’s species and natural spaces are habitat degradation, climate change, invasive species, overexploitation and pollution.  The Commissioner has previously warned about the lack of action to safeguard the province’s 200 species at risk such as snapping turtles, cougars, and Jefferson salamanders. Gord Miller has said the government also needs to address the threats from invasive species like Asian carp, and protect wetlands and woodlands in southern Ontario.

The Environmental Commissioner says, “the federal government has promised, during the current International Decade for Biodiversity, to conserve biodiversity on behalf of all Canadians.” It is imperative that the Government of Ontario acts quickly and come up with a plan to implement those commitments.  This requires a new Biodiversity Strategy. Rhetoric alone will not suffice.”

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 The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario is appointed by the Legislative Assembly to be the province’s independent environmental watchdog, reporting publicly on the government’s environmental decision making.

Download the special report “Biodiversity: A Nation’s Commitment, an Obligation for Ontario” and the Commissioner’s opening remarks to the Legislature at http://www.eco.on.ca/

Watch the Commissioner’s comments of this report here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-6mWZcio4

For more information, contact:

Maria Leung

Communications and Outreach Coordinator

Environmental Commissioner of Ontario

416-325-3371

1-800-701-6454

maria.leung@eco.on.ca

For support in French, please contact Jean-Marc Filion at 705-476-9665.

Aussi disponible en français 

• Download the ECO’s 2010/11 Annual Report Engaging Solutions (.pdf).
• Download the Supplement to the Annual Report (.pdf)
• Click to download the Commissioner’s Remarks to the Legislature (.pdf)

(Toronto, November 29, 2011) Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner is worried that Ontario has lost momentum when it comes to the province’s pressing environmental issues.

In his 2010/2011 Annual Report “Engaging Solutions” released today, Gord Miller says there’s no shortage of talk about the problems such as climate change, waste diversion, and the loss of biodiversity. “But when it comes to doing something” says Miller, “there doesn’t seem to be a lot actually happening.

The Environmental Commissioner cited a number of examples of this lack of inertia in his annual report:

• On waste, the Ministry of the Environment has written four different reports and discussion papers outlining options for increasing waste diversion in the province. But this has resulted in little action on what Miller says should be one of the government’s top environmental priorities.

• On species-at-risk, the Ministry of Natural Resources is not doing enough to protect and recover species at risk. Much of what the ministry is doing has become an empty bureaucratic exercise that does little on-the-ground to tangibly benefit endangered species.

• On funding, the Government of Ontario has passed notable legislation such as the Lake Simcoe Protection Act, 2008, the Endangered Species Act, 2007 and the Green Energy Act, 2009, but has not given the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of the Environment the additional resources they need to oversee and monitor new legislation while also covering their previous core responsibilities.

• On the Great Lakes, lengthy negotiations between Ontario and the federal government threaten to paralyze progress towards further clean-up, and Ontario is allowing its existing policy tools to idle. Meantime, the Obama administration has promised $2.2 billion over 5 years.

Miller says this lack of action is not accidental: it’s actually the goal of critics of environmental protection. “We respond to people who say they don’t believe there’s a problem”, says the Environmental Commissioner, “by going back to the research findings to debate and explain it all over again. And then, when it looks like progress is being made, others say the proposed solutions won’t work, or are too costly. And so we go back to the beginning again.”

“We have to find a way to get to a point of action on these issues” says the Environmental Commissioner. “We don’t see ourselves as having a culture of inaction and procrastination. Yet that would be a fair criticism from any impartial observer.”

The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario is appointed by the Legislative Assembly to be the province’s independent environmental watchdog, reporting publicly on the government’s environmental decision making.

Click here to download the full report (.pdf).

Accompanying media releases:

MOE and MNR Can’t Handle Core Responsibilities

Ontario Government Failing Endangered Species

Government Failing to Reduce Ontario’s Waste

• Download the full report (.pdf).
• Download the Supplement to the Annual Report (.pdf)
• Click to download the Commissioner’s Remarks to the Legislature (.pdf)

Image taken from U.S Fish and Wildlife Service National Digital Library

Canada’s Environment Minister, the Honourable Peter Kent, announced today that polar bears will be designated a species of special concern under the federal Species at Risk Act.  ”Canada is home to two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population and we have a unique conservation responsibility to effectively care for them,” said Minister Kent.  I sincerely agree with his statement.

Our province of Ontario is home to the southernmost population of polar bears in the world – a species that is widely recognized as suffering the most immediate impacts of climate change. Scientists warn that there is a high probability that Ontario’s population of about 1,000 polar bears will be gone from the province within 45 years due to decreases in sea ice in Hudson Bay, which constitute an integral part of their habitat.

Polar bears were listed as a threatened species under Ontario’s Endangered Species Act in September 2009; this designation constitutes a higher risk level and even more of an imperative for action than the federal listing announced today.

Our provincial law obligates the Minister of Natural Resources to ensure the preparation of a completed recovery strategy within two years of the species’ listing.    Right now, only a draft recovery strategy for polar bears exists – without a finalized strategy, the process of planning for conservation action is at a standstill.  It is critical that the Ontario government properly follow the Endangered Species Act process, a topic I discussed in my 2009 Special Report.

At the next step in the process, the Ontario government is meant to lay out all the options and we begin the public dialogue which likely involves making some difficult decisions.  It’s here where we can weigh socio-economic considerations and even make moral choices.  But if we don’t even get to that stage, the public is deprived of a transparent and accountable process.  That’s the core purpose of our Environment Bill of Rights and my job as Environmental Commissioner to warn when it’s off track.

What’s lost if this process isn’t followed is public confidence in how our laws are meant to work.  Also, in this case, we haven’t been given the chance to publicly debate what we’re going to do about an iconic and imperilled species, which may be gone from the Ontario that our grandchildren will inherit.  I hope we get back on track quickly.

The Ministry of Natural Resources is currently asking for public comment on the Environmental Registry on its proposal for protecting caribou habitat, including when permits would be required under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and when some forms of development would be exempted. The comment period ends March 10th, 2011.

The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario (ECO) has reported on caribou conservation in several of its Annual Reports to the Ontario legislature, most recently in September 2010.

The ECO also released a Special Report to the Ontario legislature in March 2009 providing an overview of the ESA: The Last Line of Defence: A Review of Ontario’s New Protections for Species at Risk.