Tag: Ministry of Environment and Climate Change

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Cottage Life

Federal government pledges $11.7 million to Ontario wetland, grassland, and forest conservation

Photo by Shutterstock/Wildnerdpix

Ontario’s conservation efforts are getting a major boost from the federal government.

Earlier this month, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, announced that his ministry would be providing more than $11.7 million to support the Ontario Land Trust Alliance’s (OLTA) efforts to conserve the province’s wetlands, grasslands, and forests.

“Canada—and Ontario—matter in the global fight to conserve and protect biodiversity. Our country is home to 24 per cent of the world’s wetlands, 25 per cent of temperate rainforest areas, and 28 per cent of remaining boreal forests. These ecosystems are globally significant as they absorb carbon, mitigate against the impacts of climate change, and protect biodiversity,” Guilbeault said in a statement.

The funding is provided through the ministry’s Nature Smart Climate Solutions Fund (NSCSF). The goal of the fund is to reduce two to four megatons of greenhouse gas emissions per year by supporting projects that conserve, restore, and enhance wetlands, peatlands, and grasslands to store and capture carbon. The fund stands at $1.4 billion and will be doled out by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) over the next 10 years.

The ministry selected the OLTA as a funding recipient because of its advocacy work for groups committed to the long-term protection and conservation of natural and cultural heritage sites across the province. “We are really grateful to Environment and Climate Change Canada for this significant support. It’s the biggest funding program that we’ve received in our lifetime,” said Alison Howson, the executive director of the OLTA.

The alliance coordinates, educates, and provides grants to land trusts around Ontario. Land trusts are charitable groups that act as custodians of significant plots of land. The OLTA works with over 33 land trust members, including the Haliburton Highlands Land Trust, Couchiching Conservancy, and the Muskoka Conservancy.

The OLTA trains members on topics such as habitat restoration, species-at-risk conservation, and climate solutions. “We don’t have any land that we hold ourselves, but we provide a whole suite of different supports to the other organizations to do the activities on the ground,” Howson said.

The funding provided by the ECCC will go towards a new program that the OLTA has started. It’s working with 10 land trust members to secure high carbon lands across the province. “The key focus is on securing lands that have good carbon sequestration and storage,” Howson said, such as wetlands, peatlands, and grasslands. “But the lands will have other benefits as well. They will have high biodiversity value. And we’re focusing on restoration of habitat, so conserving land that can be restored for particular species at risk.”

Land trusts tend to be more flexible than the federal or provincial government and are better equipped to protect small parcels of significant land, especially in southern Ontario where the land tends to be fragmented. “The federal or provincial governments aren’t necessarily interested in or are able to leverage protection of smaller parcels for a protected area,” Howson said. “But we’re able to do that through working with private landowners who are interested in donating, or in some cases, selling their properties to land trust charities, and then the charities will hold those lands.”

Already the OLTA has secured parcels of significant land near the Ganaraska Forest, northwest of Oshawa, and Thunder Bay. “We’re protecting those types of projects from other use, such as logging operations,” Howson said. “They’re really significant wetland and forested swamp areas.”

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Cottage Life

Can the federal government intervene in Doug Ford’s Greenbelt development plan?

Asclepias, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has said he may intervene in the Ford government’s plan to develop sections of the Greenbelt. During an interview with The Narwhal, he said it was possible the federal government could use the Species at Risk Act to halt planned development near the Rouge National Urban Park in Toronto—a known corridor for Blanding’s turtles, an at-risk species. Or, he said, the government could use the Impact Assessment Act, which the feds used in 2021 to determine whether Ontario’s Highway 413, needed additional federal oversight.

While the statement from Guilbeault is the first time that he’s publicly stated the federal government could attempt to intervene, he has been voicing concerns over Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s intention to build 50,000 homes on sections of protected Greenbelt land.

During a press conference in Toronto in January, the minister said that the provincial government’s plan to remove 7,400 acres of land from the Greenbelt for development, “flies in the face of everything we’re trying to do in terms of being better prepared for the impacts of climate change.”

At a press conference in Brampton, Ford told reporters he was disappointed to hear Guilbeault’s comments, “This is our jurisdiction,” he said. “You can’t complain about not having enough housing for years and then complain when we come up with a solution to do it. We’re going to continue building the 50,000 homes on those pieces of property.”

Despite Ford’s confidence, the Greenbelt development hit a snag in late January when Ontario’s integrity commissioner and auditor general announced they would be separately investigating the project to see whether the Ford government colluded with developers when opening the land for homebuilding.

Ford has denied any wrongdoing.

Can the federal government legally intervene?

Assuming the project does move forward, there are no guarantees that the federal government will intervene in the Greenbelt development. “There’s a certain amount of signaling communication, of sending messages, sending hard messages, sending soft messages that are public. And then there’s, of course, what the governments are saying to each other privately,” says Patrick Fafard, a professor in the University of Ottawa’s department of public and international affairs. “The minister’s comment was not accidental. It was very deliberate. But it’s really hard, based on the limited information we have, to know what their ultimate goal is. I would leave open the possibility that there’s a range of goals of which actually going and using federal legislation to frustrate the build may not actually be the only goal or may not even be the goal. There could be other things going on.”

In regards to using the Species at Risk Act to stop development, Fafard says the act doesn’t give the federal government authority over private land or Crown land, which make up much of the areas set to be developed. It does, however, give the federal government authority over national parks, such as the Rouge National Urban Park, and adjacent land where species-at-risk may move through.

The Impact Assessment Act is more ambiguous. Fafard says it’s unclear whether the federal or provincial government’s environmental assessment takes precedence over a given project. “[Guilbeault’s comments] may be the federal government taking advantage of that ambiguity,” he says.

If the federal government decided to use legislation to intervene with the Greenbelt development, it is possible that the provincial government could push back by taking the feds to court.

“Canadian history is littered with examples, where for all sorts of reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, the government of Canada takes an action and says, ‘We’re going to use our authority to do this.’ And one or more provincial governments say, ‘No, we don’t like that.’ So, it goes to the Supreme Court,” Fafard says. “The Supreme Court for 150 years has been in the business of issuing rulings that say, ‘Well, we look at these two pieces of legislation, we look at the Constitution Act, and for the following reasons, we agree that the federal government has the authority or we don’t agree that the federal government has the authority.’”

Will the federal government intervene?

Julie Simmons, a political science professor at the University of Guelph, says she wonders if the federal government has started to shy away from intervening with the Greenbelt development. “The fact that the Environment Minister has not repeated what he said suggests to me that this is not a strategy that the Prime Minister’s Office is supporting at this time.”

She speculates that it could be because the federal government is in the midst of negotiating health care agreements with each province. If a problem, like the Greenbelt development, rears its head elsewhere, it could have ripple effects on the negotiations.

“The federal government isn’t likely to want to be micromanaging what’s happening in Ontario in this instance,” Simmons says. “If there’s a media spotlight on something that’s not what the federal government is focusing on currently with the provinces, then there is political capital to be lost or gained.”

Simmons does add, however, that Guilbeault and Ford butting heads over the Greenbelt could be beneficial.

“There is a train of thought that the environment benefits when there is friction between the two governments because there is a little bit more overlap of care for the environment,” she says, “rather than streamlining of care for the environment, which sometimes means streamlining for the benefit of industry.”

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Cottage Life

Plastic producers launch lawsuit to reverse Canada’s ban on single-use plastics

Photo by Shutterstock/Mr.anaked

Thirty-three plastic-producing companies have banded together to fight the Canadian government’s decision to ban certain single-use plastics. On July 15, the group, known as the Responsible Plastic Use Coalition (RPUC), filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government, asking the federal courts to repeal the ban.

Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault and Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos published the ban’s final regulations in June. The regulations target checkout bags, cutlery, takeout containers, stir sticks, straws, and six-pack rings.

Starting December 2022, manufacturing and importing these plastics will be banned. Businesses will have until December 2023 to deplete their stocks. After that, it will be prohibited to sell the items. And the government has said it will ban the exporting of these plastics by the end of 2025.

What RPUC takes issue with is that under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) plastic pollution is now considered “toxic”.

“The federal government designated all plastic manufactured items as toxic, a designation we believe is not only inaccurate but could have far-reaching and unintended consequences. Canadians rely on plastic to sustain everyday life—from eyeglasses to diapers, to water piping, to computers, phones, and baby bottles,” the coalition wrote on its website. “We believe there are far more impactful policy solutions to divert waste from our natural environment.”

RPUC did not respond to comment when asked to elaborate on its alternative policy solutions.

When asked about the lawsuit by Cottage Life, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said over email: “Recently, a group of plastic companies filed another lawsuit against the Government of Canada, this time to try and stop the government’s ban on harmful single-use plastics. That’s their choice. Our choice is to stay focused on fighting plastic pollution and on fighting for our environment. And we’re confident the courts will agree with our position.”

The decision to label plastic pollution as toxic came after the government published a scientific assessment in 2020, concluding that “the improper management of plastic waste has led to plastics becoming ubiquitous in all major compartments of the environment.”

The assessment went on to say that plastic pollution has been detected on shorelines, and in surface waters, sediment, groundwater, soil, indoor and outdoor air, food, and drinking water. Approximately one per cent of plastic waste enters the environment each year. That was the equivalent of 29,000 tonnes of plastic in 2016. And since plastic degrades slowly, the amount of plastic pollution found in the environment increases over time.

This poses a serious risk to animals that ingest or become entangled in the plastic, often dying as a result. Ingestion can also impact the health of humans.

According to the federal government, 15 billion plastic checkout bags are used every year and approximately 16 million straws are used daily. By introducing a ban on these items, the government estimates that over the next decade it will eliminate 1.3 million tonnes of hard-to-recycle plastic waste and 22,000 tonnes of plastic pollution.

This is a step in the right direction, but more work needs to be done, said Karen Wirsig, the plastics program manager for the environmental advocacy group Environmental Defence, in a statement.

“Banning these plastics is the most effective way to solve the problem. Leading countries on every continent are implementing bans on plastics, so it’s good to see Canada keeping its promise to roll out bans here. But this is only the first of many steps the government must take to reach its goal of zero plastic waste by 2030. We’ll be looking for additional bans to address more single-use plastics that continue to plague the environment, as well as measures to ensure reuse and refill options are widely available,” she said.

Wirsig also commented on RPUC’s lawsuit, claiming that Environmental Defence was appalled by the coalition’s actions. “The plastics industry insists that better waste collection and recycling are the answer but after years of failed recycling efforts, it’s never been more obvious that plastic pollution is not a waste management problem. These bans are the first clear sign that making and using less plastic is not only possible, but doable and necessary.”