Don't let environmental protection slip under the guise of pandemic recovery

Don't let environmental protection slip under the guise of pandemic recovery

Ford's government has been taking advantage of the pandemic to quietly strip back environmental protection.

Now they plan to change laws to allow loggers to ransack species-at-risk habitat and strip Conservation Authorities of their power to prevent unsound developments on flood risk land — all under "budget" Bill 229, which they've cleverly called "Protect, Support and Recover from COVID-19 Act".

This is serious.

 Hiding environmental rollbacks under a pandemic budget bill allows Ford's cronies to push Bill 229 through at break-neck speed without letting the public participate.

We need you to urge your MPP directly to make sure ...

Ford's government has been taking advantage of the pandemic to quietly strip back environmental protection.

Now they plan to change laws to allow loggers to ransack species-at-risk habitat and strip Conservation Authorities of their power to prevent unsound developments on flood risk land — all under "budget" Bill 229, which they've cleverly called "Protect, Support and Recover from COVID-19 Act".

This is serious.

 Hiding environmental rollbacks under a pandemic budget bill allows Ford's cronies to push Bill 229 through at break-neck speed without letting the public participate.

We need you to urge your MPP directly to make sure the environmentally-damaging schedules are removed from Bill 229:

Schedule 6 will strip Conservation Authorities of their ability to prevent development that would normally be prohibited (such as building in flood risk zones). It will also stack their boards with elected officials that will be required to advocate only for their own community rather than act in the best interest of the watershed. These changes not only run contrary to the watershed-based approach for conservation, but are a hand-out to Ford's developer friends, who will be able to get permission to build directly from his cabinet.

Schedule 8 will enable forestry to kill species-at-risk and destroy their habitat even though habitat loss is the key driver of species endangerment. Species at risk protections under the Endangered Species Act were designed to apply to loggers, but the forest industry was granted a rolling exemption and allowed to log in their habitat. Now that exemption will be set in stone, and loggers cutting in the public forest will only have to follow their planning manual and policy documents — a set of rules which are so weak that they resulted in us needing the legal authority of the Endangered Species Act in the first place.

Read Bill 229 in full here.

 

Photo: Least Bittern, a threatened species relying on disappearing wetland habitat. Courtesy of Ann Brokelman.

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