Ontarians have worked incredibly hard to secure strong environmental protections for the province. Ontario was the first jurisdiction in North America to phase-out coal use and with the introduction of the Endangered Species Act, was once looked to as the gold standard in species protection.

But a lot has changed during the last couple of years — and we aren’t the only ones that have noticed. 

On November 18, Ontario’s Auditor General released a series of reports that conclude the Ford government is failing to adhere to environmental laws and often does not provide enough time for consultation on legislation or post environmentally-significant proposals publicly at all. 

Since stepping into office in 2018, the Ford government has launched a number of attacks on environmental protections, including: scrapping Ontario’s cap and trade program (without public consultation), fighting against the federal government’s national measures to combat the climate emergency, making major changes to Ontario’s Environmental Assessment Act, the Planning Act and other environmental laws without consulting Ontarians as required by the province’s Environmental Bill of Rights and suspending the public’s right to comment and appeal environmentally significant proposals made during the Environmental Bill of Rights exemption period (such as allowing industrial facilities to discharge pollutants to the air and water in Ontario communities).

We’ve also seen his government (unsuccessfully) try and shut down a youth-led climate lawsuit that challenges the province’s weakened climate plan. 

If that wasn’t enough, the Ford government tabled a troubling budget bill in early November.

While the government has positioned the 2020 budget bill as laying the groundwork for an economic recovery, hidden within it is a mechanism to override the ability of Conservation Authorities to make science-based decisions regarding the protection of wetlands, woodlands, endangered species habitats and flood protection. This isn’t the first time the Ford government has tried to use a COVID-19 economic recovery plan to sneak through regulatory rollbacks and prevent members of the public from participating in environmental decision-making. 

The government’s proposed changes would essentially give the province the ability to greenlight development permits in important ecosystems without the checks and balances the Conservation Authorities provide. In southern Ontario, it is estimated that we’ve already lost approximately 68 per cent of our original wetlands due mainly to development and agricultural intensification. We can’t afford to lose anymore. 

Individually, each one of the changes made by the Ford government might not seem significant but when we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, as the Auditor General did recently, we start to see an Ontario whose deteriorating environmental protections expose people, the climate and ecosystems to irreversible harms.