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The Ontario government hasn’t turned down a request for a permit to harm a threatened species in four years, the province’s environment commissioner reported Tuesday, and it doesn’t check whether the rules for the permits are followed anyway.
Eastern Ontario is a hot spot for this stuff, commissioner Dianne Saxe says in a damning section of her annual report, because we have a lot of development going on and a lot of animals and plants that are in danger. Collectively they’re called “species at risk,” which covers everything from ones biologists are mildly concerned about to ones they suspect are wiped out.
Ontario has 237 of them, more are added to the list each year than are removed, and about half are officially “endangered,” the most serious category short of “extirpated.”
The system for protecting them, run by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF, in the jargon) is a catastrophic failure, Saxe says.
“With each passing year, the extent of this failure becomes more clear — the ministry has reduced what should have been a robust system for protecting species at risk to what is largely a paper exercise,” her report says. “The MNRF is failing to not just protect species at risk as intended under the law, but also to lead effective recovery programs. In the best case, the MNRF has created a system that leaves itself with a minimal role to play; in the worse case, it has a created a system designed to fail.”
Dianne Saxe was Toronto’s most prominent environmental lawyer before being named Ontario’s environment commissioner.
We’ve got two major problems, in Saxe’s view, both dating to 2013 when the province simplified approvals.
First, we stopped requiring tailored permits for each case of species-bothering, in favour of a system of “permit-by-rule.” Instead of laying out your case to the natural-resources ministry and negotiating the details, in most instances you can just register your plans and go ahead. We went from about 175 comparatively detailed permits issued in 2011, the busiest year under the old system, to more than 600 registrations in 2015. Nearly half of them now are for infrastructure work of some kind — roads and bridges, power lines, water systems.
It might be, Saxe allows, that before the 2013 changeover, a lot of construction work harmed species on the sly. But rubber-stamping damage instead of being unaware of it is not a great improvement.
The ministry eyeballs these registrations in a database but doesn’t send anybody out to check. Only ministry enforcement officers, a small subset of its workers, have the necessary authority under the Endangered Species Act, Saxe reports. Their branch “does not have any inspection targets or protocols” in this field.
Second, we dramatically downgraded the standards people had to meet to get permission at all.
The system always had some balancing built into it: If you had to kill some critters to fix a bridge that was in danger of falling down, that was easier than getting approval to kill some critters to add extra lanes, for instance. But in cases that weren’t emergencies, you typically had to go to some effort to show that by the time you were done, the species you were harming with your work would be better off. You’d add habitat, expand wildlife travel corridors, plant trees, something like that.
Wooden stilted boxes that aroused the curiosity of passing motorists and others on Riverside Drive near Main Street were installed there to encourage barn swallows to nest there after being displaced by construction on the McIlraith Bridge nearby.
Now, the standard is just that you have to minimize the harm your actions will cause.
“The massive shift from overall benefit to minimizing harm — a much lower standard of protection — now authorizes harm to most species at risk across Ontario,” Saxe concludes. “Meanwhile, the MNRF relies on blind faith and on public complaints instead of an effective compliance and enforcement strategy. It makes no attempt to ensure routine compliance, to prevent cumulative impacts, or to monitor the effect of its permit-by-rule system on species at risk.”
The ministry’s response to Saxe’s report defends its work without really challenging any of Saxe’s particulars.
“The (Endangered Species Act’s) flexibility mechanisms such as authorizations and regulations are intended to ensure that Ontario’s businesses and residents continue to prosper while protecting and recovering species at risk and their habitats,” the ministry says. Yes, you can count the permits we issue, but you can’t count the value of the informal advice we give.
And the results aren’t all bad. The ministry cites three cases where people building things made conditions better for endangered animals. When Ottawa built a snow dump that was bad for endangered Blanding’s turtles, for instance, the city added culverts under roads elsewhere in the city so different animals of the same species would get killed less.
The rules recognize that everyone has a role to play in saving species from extermination, it says: “The government is proud that the ESA is implemented using a stewardship-first approach and recognizes that all Ontarians value and have a responsibility to help protect and recover species at risk.”
“Stewardship-first” here means trusting that people will do what’s right for the environment because it’s right, rather than because the government is bossing them around. Which is a noble idea, but relying on goodwill is a philosophical starting point for regulating, not the whole list of what you do.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Eastern Ontario is a hot spot for this stuff, commissioner Dianne Saxe says in a damning section of her annual report, because we have a lot of development going on and a lot of animals and plants that are in danger. Collectively they’re called “species at risk,” which covers everything from ones biologists are mildly concerned about to ones they suspect are wiped out.
Ontario has 237 of them, more are added to the list each year than are removed, and about half are officially “endangered,” the most serious category short of “extirpated.”
The system for protecting them, run by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF, in the jargon) is a catastrophic failure, Saxe says.
“With each passing year, the extent of this failure becomes more clear — the ministry has reduced what should have been a robust system for protecting species at risk to what is largely a paper exercise,” her report says. “The MNRF is failing to not just protect species at risk as intended under the law, but also to lead effective recovery programs. In the best case, the MNRF has created a system that leaves itself with a minimal role to play; in the worse case, it has a created a system designed to fail.”
Dianne Saxe was Toronto’s most prominent environmental lawyer before being named Ontario’s environment commissioner.
We’ve got two major problems, in Saxe’s view, both dating to 2013 when the province simplified approvals.
First, we stopped requiring tailored permits for each case of species-bothering, in favour of a system of “permit-by-rule.” Instead of laying out your case to the natural-resources ministry and negotiating the details, in most instances you can just register your plans and go ahead. We went from about 175 comparatively detailed permits issued in 2011, the busiest year under the old system, to more than 600 registrations in 2015. Nearly half of them now are for infrastructure work of some kind — roads and bridges, power lines, water systems.
It might be, Saxe allows, that before the 2013 changeover, a lot of construction work harmed species on the sly. But rubber-stamping damage instead of being unaware of it is not a great improvement.
The ministry eyeballs these registrations in a database but doesn’t send anybody out to check. Only ministry enforcement officers, a small subset of its workers, have the necessary authority under the Endangered Species Act, Saxe reports. Their branch “does not have any inspection targets or protocols” in this field.
Second, we dramatically downgraded the standards people had to meet to get permission at all.
The system always had some balancing built into it: If you had to kill some critters to fix a bridge that was in danger of falling down, that was easier than getting approval to kill some critters to add extra lanes, for instance. But in cases that weren’t emergencies, you typically had to go to some effort to show that by the time you were done, the species you were harming with your work would be better off. You’d add habitat, expand wildlife travel corridors, plant trees, something like that.
Wooden stilted boxes that aroused the curiosity of passing motorists and others on Riverside Drive near Main Street were installed there to encourage barn swallows to nest there after being displaced by construction on the McIlraith Bridge nearby.
Now, the standard is just that you have to minimize the harm your actions will cause.
“The massive shift from overall benefit to minimizing harm — a much lower standard of protection — now authorizes harm to most species at risk across Ontario,” Saxe concludes. “Meanwhile, the MNRF relies on blind faith and on public complaints instead of an effective compliance and enforcement strategy. It makes no attempt to ensure routine compliance, to prevent cumulative impacts, or to monitor the effect of its permit-by-rule system on species at risk.”
The ministry’s response to Saxe’s report defends its work without really challenging any of Saxe’s particulars.
“The (Endangered Species Act’s) flexibility mechanisms such as authorizations and regulations are intended to ensure that Ontario’s businesses and residents continue to prosper while protecting and recovering species at risk and their habitats,” the ministry says. Yes, you can count the permits we issue, but you can’t count the value of the informal advice we give.
And the results aren’t all bad. The ministry cites three cases where people building things made conditions better for endangered animals. When Ottawa built a snow dump that was bad for endangered Blanding’s turtles, for instance, the city added culverts under roads elsewhere in the city so different animals of the same species would get killed less.
The rules recognize that everyone has a role to play in saving species from extermination, it says: “The government is proud that the ESA is implemented using a stewardship-first approach and recognizes that all Ontarians value and have a responsibility to help protect and recover species at risk.”
“Stewardship-first” here means trusting that people will do what’s right for the environment because it’s right, rather than because the government is bossing them around. Which is a noble idea, but relying on goodwill is a philosophical starting point for regulating, not the whole list of what you do.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
