Piping plover © Sarah Pietrkiewicz
In June, the Ontario government passed Bill 5, driving, among other things, a dangerous dismantling of nature protections. Part of this omnibus bill replaced the province’s Endangered Species Act with a weaker Species Conservation Act, which it is now proposing regulatory changes to implement.
The proposed changes will almost entirely remove the provincial government’s responsibility to deliver a deliberate and strategic approach to species at risk recovery in Ontario in the name of fast-tracking economic development, and will specifically remove protection for 106 species at risk including the piping plover, monarch butterfly and yellow-banded bumble bee.
But endangered species are not red tape.
How can you help?
We can’t stay silent while Ontario strips away provincial environmental protections.
Implementing the Species Conservation Act as proposed will put wildlife and nature at greater risk by removing protections for 106 species, reducing the role of science-based decision-making, and removing requirements and timelines to produce recovery strategies, among other concerns.
This is not red-tape reduction; it’s environmental deregulation with no accountability at the cost of species extinctions and the risk of long-term ecological collapse.
