The Government of Ontario has set its sights on “improving” Ontario’s Endangered Species Act, posting a discussion paper on the Environmental Registry. However, the paper makes it clear that the province’s primary objective in revisiting the act is not to ensure efficient recovery for Ontario’s at-risk species but, rather, to find even more efficiencies for industries that want to operate in the spaces that species depend upon to live.

Tell the Ontario government to keep species at risk safe

The primary cause of wildlife decline in Ontario (and nationally, and globally) is habitat loss and degradation, for which limits need to be set, not greater efficiencies created.

In 2013, the province passed an amendment that exempts a broad suite of industrial and development activities from the rules against harming endangered and threatened species and their habitats. In other words, the ESA is already failing to effectively safeguard the habitat that wildlife needs.

The provincial government touts itself as a government of the people. If measures to weaken the ESA are greeted with the same outrage that met the province’s proposal to gut protection measures for the Greenbelt, maybe the province will recognize that the people care about wildlife.

We need to ensure that the province upholds a piece of legislation intended to change business-as-usual activities that drive wildlife decline, not pave the way for them. Please send your message to the government now.

Thank you,

Rachel Plotkin

Boreal Program Manager

P.S. Join us for a free webinar on February 20th at 2pm EST to find out what’s at stake with the review of Ontario’s Endangered Species Act and what you can do to help. Register here.