Deconstruction of Our Environmental Heritage

The legislation and policy structure that we have so painstakingly constructed over the last 50 years to protect our natural environment is being destroyed, piece by piece by the Ford government. Recently in the omnibus Bill 5, our Endangered Species Act was repealed, the environmental assessment legislation was neutered and a new measure to delineate special economic zones where environment laws can be  suspended was created. The latest attack is the posted proposal to fragment and sell off apiece of one of our provincial parks for private development.

All of these initiatives are justified in the interests of destroying natural heritage and sensible planning for short-term financial gain. This is a false economic model. Natural heritage has value beyond measure to present populations as well as future generations for decades to come. It cannot be replaced or substituted for. Protecting the ecological integrity of our living landscape is of paramount importance and the only true irreplaceable source of ecological wealth.

If the proposal to sever and sell an integral piece of Wasaga Provincial Park is allowed to progress we are not only squandering the most utilized such provincial facility in the province, we are violating the trust of the Ontario people. Many forget that in the late 1990s we went through a cathartic process to partition the use of Ontario’s Crown land between protected reserves and lands for economic utilization. Thousands of people participated and eventually all parties, industrial and civil, signed a deal that resulted in the creation of 378 parks and reserves that were intended to be the minimum necessary to ensure the persistence of our natural legacy. In addition, an aspirational commitment was made to expand these protected lands if unassigned properties became available.

This is the heritage trust we are violating. We must stop this process of  retreating from our environmental protect policies before more irreparable damage is done.

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