Summary

• The amalgamation of Ontario’s 36 conservation authorities into nine regional bodies is expected to take effect in early 2027.
• A new directive from Environment Minister Todd McCarthy orders conservation authorities to halt any major decision-making processes, such as changing staffing structures or purchasing property, in the meantime.
• After a meeting between Environment Ministry officials and conservation authority staff on May 6, 2026, one public servant told The Narwhal, “The province has essentially handcuffed conservation authorities.”

On Friday, May 1, Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy sent a letter to all conservation authority heads directing them to halt any “significant financial, asset or employment decisions” as the government begins consolidating the agencies tasked with protecting watersheds. 

The letter signals that the work to amalgamate authorities from 36 to nine, and shift oversight to a new government agency that takes direction from McCarthy’s office, has begun. 

Five days later, senior ministry officials told authority staff in an internal meeting that this reorganization will be complicated and still contains many unknowns. 

The directives “were not easy to write,” a senior official said at the meeting. “I’ll be frank to say that this required us to get into the [conservation authority] business in a way that we as a ministry aren’t typically.”

A recording of that meeting, which included discussion of the consolidation on drinking water protections, was shared with The Narwhal by one participant and independently verified by another. The Narwhal is not identifying the officials who led the meeting by name to respect their privacy as public sector workers with limited authority.

In it, a director in the ministry’s conservation and source protection branch notes the directive McCarthy sent out to authorities was not meant to affect the day-to-day business of conservation authorities, but to “put some guardrails in place that would sort of mitigate against any decision, like extraordinary decisions that would not be to the benefit of the regional [conservation authority].” 

Such guardrails are common in government-initiated mergers, the official said, to protect agencies and organizations from decisions that may harm their consolidated form. A staff member from McCarthy’s office, speaking unofficially, told The Narwhal this is “standard operating practice” for any amalgamation, designed to “essentially keep things stable.”  

Rhonda Bateman, chief administrative officer of Lower Trent Conservation, said in an email to The Narwhal, “It was not a surprise. We were expecting some direction.” 

“When businesses amalgamate or are merged, there needs to be a baseline of information available and I believe this is the intent behind the direction,” she said.

Along with the recording, The Narwhal was sent a copy of McCarthy’s letter, which was later publicly posted by the ministry. The Narwhal reached out to 10 conservation authority officials for comment, with most saying they were not allowed to comment, could not comment for fear of repercussions or were still trying to understand the implications of the directive. Five people agreed to speak to The Narwhal for this story, all on the condition of confidentiality. 

“The province has essentially handcuffed conservation authorities,” one public servant who attended the meeting told The Narwhal. “Conservation authorities are not in control now [of the consolidation], and it seems that they won’t be in control moving forward.” 

One conservation authority official in central Ontario said they were “surprised” by the “sweeping” nature of the directive, and felt that the consolidation was “out of our hands.”  

Conservation authorities are tasked with protecting Ontario watersheds by safeguarding local drinking water sources and reducing the risks from natural hazards like flooding, erosion and drought. The government’s move to amalgamate them from 36 agencies to nine is the biggest disruption since the agencies were created 80 years ago, and has created widespread concern about their continued ability to preserve access to fresh water for more than 80 per cent of Ontario residents.

The government’s 2026 budget officially greenlit the consolidation and gave the environment minister powers to issue directives as needed. It also created a new Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency, which will oversee the 36 conservation authorities during the transition, under the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks. This agency will work with Hassaan Basit, a longtime conservation authority official who is now the province’s chief conservation executive, and is staffed by a handful of bureaucrats, with a five-person board of directors made up of deputy ministers from other ministries. The agency’s goal is to see resources equally shared among the consolidated conservation authorities.

McCarthy’s first directive on the consolidation restricts conservation authorities’ actions to what has already been set out in their 2026 budgets. That includes making any changes to staff or governance structure, acquiring or disposing of any land, approving any new projects (like wells, for example) or making major purchases without explicit authorization from the government.

The official from McCarthy’s office told The Narwhal they expect conservation authorities to be able to do things that are beyond their budget. “We’ll likely approve it,” they said. “Conservation authorities remain independent.” They also noted that the restrictions don’t apply to land donations, as “they are not an expense.” 

The directive notes there will also be exceptions in responding to “an immediate danger to human life, health or property.” The official from McCarthy’s office said, for example, this could be “if the conservation authority has a dam and the dam is on the verge of breaking and they need to make emergency repairs.” 

These restrictions are in place until at least Feb. 1, 2027, when the consolidation is expected to take effect. They can be amended any time “at the sole discretion of the minister,” according to the letter.

Ontario’s drinking water is tied up in conservation authority changes but officials have few details

The details of how McCarthy’s directive will affect conservation authorities’ work protecting drinking water remain unclear. 

The authorities work closely with community-led source protection committees, which include directors from industries like agriculture, manufacturing and tourism to protect and properly manage drinking water. 

The province’s 19 source protection committees were created on the heels of the deadly water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ont. They are supported by staff from conservation authorities, who provide data and carry out protective actions as the source protection authority.

The Narwhal reported in April on the impacts of consolidation on source protection committees, and the fact that 15 of the 19 committees had vacant chair positions. The government began seeking people to fill the chair positions soon after.

Many source protection staff were in attendance at the May 6 meeting hosted by Ministry of Environment officials after McCarthy’s directive was issued. 

In the recording of the meeting, ministry officials are heard assuring attendees that they were happy to keep working with conservation authority staff, and that the government remains committed to preserving drinking water protections. But the officials repeatedly said things are still being figured out, with “a range of scenarios” being considered. They acknowledged the lack of answers was “not terribly reassuring” and “anxiety producing, probably” for conservation authorities.  

During the two-hour meeting, ministry officials did not answer direct questions about whether the source protection regions would also be consolidated. 

“I think that is probably the first question that needs to be answered, and we can’t answer it,” the official responded. “Obviously, that has to come from the decisions from whoever is making them.”

McCarthy previously told The Narwhal the 19 source protection committees will remain as they are and work with the nine regional conservation authorities, but said their jurisdictions are “a work in progress.” The government has said changes to the Clean Water Act will be needed but hasn’t specified what those changes will be.  

“We’ve got eight months to sort out the details,” the official from McCarthy’s office told The Narwhal. “The point is not to rush this. We just started the process.”

During the meeting, ministry officials gave two explanations for their inability to answer attendees’ questions. First, they said they weren’t directly part of the decision-making process as the transition is being run by the new Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency, “not the ministry.” And second, they cited cabinet confidentiality, referring to private policy deliberations between Premier Doug Ford, his ministers and senior ministry officials. 

“Typically, sometimes the reason you have to, like, back away and stop engaging is because things become cabinet confidential at a certain point,” a senior official said in the meeting. “I’m not allowed, right? Because it’s become a cabinet process.”

They continued that staff in the ministry were working to ensure source protection plans, for example, weren’t being unnecessarily rewritten, though much of the consolidation process was still being sorted out.

“This isn’t a change many people were asking for and want necessarily, and I fully appreciate that I can’t necessarily know what all this means to you,” one official said in the meeting. They added that they hoped to help conservation authorities understand “what our thinking has been around the transition planning.”

“This is a government that is set to do this,” the official said. “This is happening.”

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Summary

• Under the Clean Water Act, community-led groups called source protection committees write plans and oversee the protection of drinking water sources in Ontario.
• The jurisdiction of the committees is aligned with the boundaries of conservation authorities, and experts say the recent amalgamation of authorities could also affect the committees.
• The province has not appointed 15 of the 19 source protection committee chairs, leaving some experts questioning whether change is afoot.

As the Doug Ford government moves to consolidate conservation authorities from 36 to nine, many are concerned about the impact on Ontario’s drinking water. 

Conservation authorities have long been tasked with protecting Ontario watersheds by safeguarding local drinking water sources and reducing the risks from natural hazards like flooding, erosion and drought. But the government’s legislation for their amalgamation — the biggest disruption to the agencies in 80 years — indicates there may be changes coming to the way they help preserve access to fresh water for more than 80 per cent of Ontario residents. 

Since 2006, municipal drinking water has been governed by 19 source protection committees, community-led groups with directors from industries like agriculture, manufacturing and tourism that hold conservation authorities and municipalities accountable for properly managing drinking water. Within each conservation authority, designated staff serve as liaisons to these committees, providing necessary data and carrying out any suggested protective actions.

“Source protection committees are purposefully local. They’re the people that drink the water they are protecting,” Katie Stammler, water quality scientist and project manager for the source water protection committee at the Essex Region Conservation Authority, told The Narwhal.

The committees were created on the heels of the water contamination crisis in Walkerton, Ont. In May 2000, seven people died and some 2,300 people became ill when manure from a nearby farm leached into a well due to a failure of safety checks in the local water treatment system. 

An inquiry into the crisis resulted in dozens of recommendations, including creating source protection committees. These groups were officially enacted by the passage of the Clean Water Act. Each one was designed with the boundaries of conservation authorities in mind and tasked with writing a plan to protect the sources of drinking water in that region from threats such as fuel, sewage, road salt and agricultural runoff.

In the years since they were formed, source protection committees seemed to be “untouchable,” Lynn Dollin, once long-time chair of the South Georgian Bay-Lake Simcoe Source Protection Committee, told The Narwhal. Successive Ontario governments didn’t want to change anything “because no one wants to risk another Walkerton.”But things might be changing now.

The Ontario government’s move to reduce the number of conservation authorities has meant that each authority now covers a much larger area. The Narwhal obtained a government slide deck presented to conservation authorities leaders earlier this month that shows drinking water source protection “remains a core mandated responsibility” for the nine proposed regional authorities, and that source protection plans “will continue to be carried out.” 

But in the same slide deck, the government also notes “changes may be needed under the Clean Water Act and associated regulations” to “clarify” how source protection committees would operate under the new structure. 

“We’re not making any fundamental changes [to source protection committees],” Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said in an interview with The Narwhal: the 19 committees will remain as they are and work with the nine newly proposed regional conservation authorities, though he said their jurisdictions are “a work in progress.”  

“Clean water is absolutely essential, and Ontario’s is best protected in the world. That’s going to continue,” he said. “The idea is to make sure it doesn’t change by better resourcing and better supporting [them] equally across Ontario.”

McCarthy added that there may be some legislative “housekeeping” in the fall to ensure “alignment” between the new regional conservation authorities and source protection committees. 

The absence of details raises red flags for experts. 

“They cut. Now they cut and tinker,” one central Ontario conservation authority official said. “They’re saying nothing is going to change, but in practice, that remains to be seen. … All the changes they’ve made so far have delayed work operations. They like to pretend otherwise.”

The Narwhal spoke to 12 people, including lawyers, members of three source protection committees and several conservation authority staff, many of whom spoke anonymously for fear of retribution. As conservation authorities get bigger, these experts worry about the loss of local input, knowledge and protections. 

Already, the chair positions at 15 of the 19 committees are vacant. To many, this quiet erosion of leadership and a loosening of water laws in the province are indicators that a system put in place to prevent another drinking water crisis is now in flux. 

Most source protection committees still don’t have government-appointed leaders

Nearly 20 years ago, Dollin, now mayor of Innisfill, Ont., was one of 19 source protection committee chairs appointed by the Ontario government to help take care of the province’s complex system of local drinking water sources.

Back then, her committee’s first task was “a little unnerving,” she said. “I was shocked how there was no good, complete list of where our municipal drinking water systems were.” So they created one, along with guidelines on how to protect them to ensure local drinking water sources don’t become contaminated or overused. 

Dollin’s term as head of South Georgian Bay-Lake Simcoe Source Protection Committee ended in August 2025; she was told by a ministry official she would not be reappointed, though she said no reason was given. Her position hasn’t been filled since. 

As of April 14, the government had not appointed several chairs — something it is legally required to do under the Clean Water Act — since summer 2025.

“The absence of appointed chairs over the past year has created some uncertainty at the committee level, particularly around governance, leadership continuity and decision-making authority,” John Mesman, managing director of property, conservation, lands and community outreach for South Nation Conservation, told The Narwhal. 

A lack of chair appointments, others say, may indicate source protection committees are a low priority amidst the amalgamation of Ontario’s conservation authorities. Many told The Narwhal communication between conservation authorities and ministry staff have been eroding since the government under former premier Mike Harris first cut funding in 1995.

“It seems the ministry doesn’t understand the source protection program, so it doesn’t bother to think about it,” the central Ontario conservation authority staff member said. “We started getting alarmed by ministry decisions a while ago on a number of issues. It’s been consistent, our comments are not being heard.”

That’s especially challenging as water supply gets more complicated. In recent weeks, the government has proposed permitting communal wells for private development. That would mean a new subdivision, for example, could draw from its own well instead of tapping into municipal water services. Sources who spoke to The Narwhal were concerned about this because communal wells aren’t currently overseen by source protection committees. 

“We need source protection leaders now more than ever to be present at the table,” a conservation authority official in western Ontario said. “As this government pushes approvals for development, we need to make sure water is not an afterthought.” 

A Ministry of Environment official told The Narwhal, “a competitive process will soon be underway” for source protection committee chair appointments. 

New boundaries of conservation authorities could affect source protection committees 

Not only do many source protection committees not have leaders right now, but they also don’t know what their jurisdictions will be post-conservation authority amalgamation.

“I don’t think [the government] contemplated a whole scale change like this,” Theresa McClenaghan, executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, said. “A lot of people don’t realize that most local drinking water sources are protected by plans that were created by these committees over many years.” 

Per the requirements of the Clean Water Act, the government has two options, McLenaghan said: realign source protection boundaries and governance to reflect the new larger regional conservation authorities or maintain the current structure within the new regional authorities. 

Minister McCarthy told The Narwhal the boundaries “are not changing at this time,” but the exact boundaries will be finalized in the fall, informed by consultations with new local watershed councils the ministry is creating to facilitate the transition. 

“We’ll have to see how this works out,” he said. “Right now, the reality is nine watershed-based regional conservation authorities are what we proposed … and with those 19 [source protection committees], we’ll have to see how their boundaries match up or align.” 

McLenaghan said if the committees stay as they are, “that’s good news,” but “there will still be some potential disruptions” as several source protection regions combine under a single conservation authority.

Right now, some source protection areas, such as Essex County, stand alone, while others like the Thames-Sydenham Source Protection Region, combine several conservation authority jurisdictions. Per a preliminary analysis by the Canadian Environmental Law Association, the amalgamation would see the inverse of this, where one regional conservation authority has several source protection regions within it. For example, both the Lake Huron and Western Lake authorities would each incorporate three source protection agencies.

The new regional conservation authorities will be “very, very busy” managing so many source protection committees under the new system, the central Ontario conservation authority official said.

Under the amalgamation plan, Stammler’s Essex County Conservation Authority now falls under the Western Lake Erie regional authority, which has boundaries spanning from Niagara through Halton and Peel Region.

She, and others, said they’re concerned this will result in a reduction in the hyper-localized focus on water that conservation authorities provide.

“I think it’s going to undermine Ontario’s ability to protect drinking water,” Ontario Greens Leader Mike Schreiner said. “I think the amalgamation of [conservation authorities] is going to contravene the recommendations of the Walkerton inquiry around source water protection.”“I mean, how can you have 19 source water protection committees across the province and nine [conservation authorities]? And how is that going to work together, especially when you’re undermining local decision-making expertise?”

It’s something local industry representatives are similarly concerned with. 

Chris Snip, an independent agronomist and water protection advocate from Essex County, has built a career helping farmers grow better crops with less impact on the environment from fertilizer use. He joined the Essex region’s source water protection committee six years ago to support the group’s understanding of agriculture and the sector’s role in maintaining water quality.

As with many in Ontario’s farming community, the Walkerton tragedy casts a long shadow for Snip. With the Ford government’s changes to water protection, in favour of easing development, Snip wonders if the province is forgetting lessons of the past.

“People died, and the policies around source water protection were based on recommendations from those deaths and injuries, and this provincial government is basically, you know, turning its nose up to it, not caring about what happened then,” he said.

“History is bound to repeat itself, especially if we don’t remember.”

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Summary

• The Ontario government has released its final plan to amalgamate 36 conservation authorities into nine
• The new plan removes an earlier proposal to merge authorities on Lake Superior and Lake Huron
• A new agency created to oversee the consolidation will have a $20-million budget to put the plan in place, and $3 million annually once it’s up and running

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The Ford government is moving ahead with its plan to merge 36 conservation authorities into nine, two more than originally proposed. And it has created an agency with a $20-million budget to see it through.

Ontario Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said he consulted with more than 500 people in making this change. The proposed plan also received more than 14,000 comments on the Environmental Registry of Ontario, where the government is legally mandated to post changes to environmental and energy policy for public feedback (though the Ford government has previously created loopholes for that requirement). 

“Ontario currently has a fragmented system of conservation authorities, each of which have different policies, different standards, different fees and different levels of staffing and technical capabilities,” McCarthy told reporters on March 10. 

“These inconsistencies have hampered the ability of conservation authorities to perform their duties. This has led to unpredictable and inconsistent turnaround times for approvals, creating uncertainty and delays for farmers, homeowners, landowners, builders and anyone seeking permits.”

The government’s proposed fix to consolidate authorities has been received with a lot of trepidation and concern from conservation authorities, the municipalities that fund them and use their services and other groups that rely on their expertise. 

For nearly 80 years, the provincial agencies have been tasked with protecting public health and safety related to the province’s watersheds. That means safeguarding local drinking water sources and working to reduce the risks from natural hazards like flooding, erosion and drought. As Ontario’s population has grown, they have also been responsible for regulating development to minimize those risks, issuing permits only to those who pay attention to sustainable construction and growth.

“Conservation authorities don’t just ‘approve’ things; they provide the technical rules of the game that make projects workable and protect people and water,” Paola Cetares, director of public affairs for the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, told The Narwhal when the consolidation plan was first announced. That includes creating criteria for stormwater management and collating flood maps, erosion data and hydrologic studies to guide development. 

McCarthy insists the core mandates of the unique Ontario agencies will not change. Consolidation, he said, will mean “stronger flood resilience, clear processes for municipalities and permanent applicants and better support for housing and infrastructure projects, all while maintaining the science-based decisions that people and businesses expect.”

“Regional conservation authorities would continue to be independent, municipally governed organizations,” McCarthy said, emphasizing that there will be no layoffs, no changes in the funding and governance structure and that the agencies would continue to have control over their land. 

The government will table legislation to make these changes when Queen’s Park is back in session later this month, with the consolidation set to take effect in 2027. 

Here are the key takeaways from the final consolidation proposal. 

What does the final conservation authority consolidation look like? 

When the Ford government first discussed consolidation, they considered as few as six regional conservation authorities, McCarthy said. After the consultation period — in which at least one member of caucus voiced her concern — the government has landed on nine. 

The final boundaries of the regional authorities’ structure include a handful of significant changes from the original proposal. 

Notably, the Lake Erie Regional Conservation Authority and a Huron-Superior Regional Conservation Authority have each been split into two. The latter was initially controversially proposed to merge the authority in Thunder Bay, Ont., on Lake Superior, with that of one on Lake Huron, but the government has walked back on that — a decision that has been welcomed by the northern agency.

Members of the impacted authorities in this region previously told The Narwhal the original boundaries were too large and connected too many differing landscapes. “We listened, we acted,” McCarthy said.

Additionally, the Central Lake Ontario Regional Conservation Authority has been enlarged to include both the current Toronto Region Conservation Authority and the smaller neighbouring Central Lake Ontario Conservation Authority. 

And the conservation authority managing the lands around the city of Kingston, Ont., has been moved from the St. Lawrence River Conservation Area to the Eastern Lake Ontario Regional Conservation Authority. 

Who will manage the conservation authority consolidation and how much will it cost?

In 2025, the Ford government created the Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency to help lead this transformation. The agency has been given $20 million to usher through the consolidation. At the March 10 press conference, McCarthy pledged an additional $3 million annually to the agency, which would continue after the consolidation was complete. 

The government intends to create transitional committees for the nine new regional organizations with representatives from each of the existing conservation authorities under them. The chair of each of these committees would become the chief administrative officer of the regional authority for up to two years. 

The government is also instructing regional authorities to create “watershed councils” made up of members of municipalities and Indigenous communities to identify local priorities and “ensure that watershed management continues to be informed by the people who know their watersheds best,” McCarthy said. 

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Last week, a member of Ontario’s Doug Ford government touted the importance of access to nature to his colleagues. 

Andrew Dowie, MPP for Windsor-Tecumseh, is spearheading Bill 26, new legislation that would amend the provincial parks law to include two new classes of parks: urban and adventure. 

The primary purpose is to facilitate the creation of a new provincial park east of Toronto in Uxbridge by connecting Greenbelt lands with rehabilitated private quarries. The legislation will also aim to create other urban and adventure parks like it. 

The bill is currently being reviewed by a government committee, which heard from members of the public this week. 

Dowie, who serves as the parliamentary assistant to the minister of the environment, conservation and parks, told his colleagues the bill codifies the idea that a growing Ontario needs different kinds of natural spaces. 

“Urban parks make nature accessible where Ontarians now live in growing towns, expanding cities and suburban communities,” he told the committee on Nov. 17. “Urban parks don’t replace traditional provincial parks. They simply acknowledge that in a province of 15 million people, proximity matters.” 

And in truth, natural spaces are getting farther and farther away from urban centres, as those centres sprawl farther and farther out.

Adventure parks, he said, “bring people into nature in different ways,” by encouraging outdoor activities like cycling, paddling, climbing and backcountry trekking, along with newer ventures like pickleball and Pokémon GO. These kinds of parks “give communities new ways to connect people with natural spaces and truly build that appreciation for our biodiversity and for ecological protection,” he said. 

On paper, it makes sense. Over the last few decades, Ontario has rapidly grown, having doubled in population since 1971. That growth has increased the need for and stress on natural spaces, which offer respite for humans and wildlife in so many ways: preserving natural areas lowers stress levels for those who visit them, reduces pollution, protects biodiversity, mitigates flood risk and more. 

But the proposal also comes from a government that continues to expend waterfronts and natural spaces in favour of development and industry. There’s a laundry list of government actions that have put parks and conservation spaces under threat in recent years — everything from the Greenbelt scandal to a bevy of changes to conservation authorities that manage watersheds and public green spaces in Ontario.

The Ford government is removing land from parks to make room for development

Bill 26 is the Ford government’s second amendment to the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act in several days, picking away at the permanent protection of the lands it governs. In addition to now including two new kinds of parks, the act is also being changed to remove lands from three existing provincial parks to make room for tourism and a highway. 

The government is proposing to remove slivers of land from Grundy Lake and French River provincial parks in northern Ontario to facilitate the widening of Highway 69. It’s also planning to remove land from Wasaga Beach Provincial Park — more than 60 per cent of which is beachfront that also serves as nesting area for endangered piping plovers — and give it to the town to help boost the local economy with tourism-specific development. The bill carrying this change is being put to a final vote this week.

The Ford government insists these changes are specific in their scope and limited in their impact because, as Dowie said, the Progressive Conservatives value nature — at least, sometimes.

Around the same time Bill 26 was tabled, the Ford government also put forward a proposal to amalgamate 36 conservation authorities — agencies unique to Ontario that manage watersheds and reduce the risk of flooding — to seven, leaving unclear the state of the thousands of acres of land these unique agencies manage to minimize flood risk and boost access to nature. Though how this will all play out remains very unclear, there is a strong precedent for Ford meddling with the authorities’ power. In recent years, conservation authorities have been told to audit their lands to find surplus areas for potential development and told the environment minister can overrule their decisions to not allow development permits (or allow them, but that’s not really on brand. Remember minister’s zoning orders or MZOs?).  

Plus, the government has watered down the rules that protect wetlands and waterways in these natural spaces, and has exempted major projects, like the Ontario Place redevelopment on the Toronto waterfront, from environmental assessments.And then there was the Greenbelt scandal, an effort to forego the protection of parcels of farmland and natural spaces for development. 

‘Nature should be part of everyday life’ — but for how long?

Cumulatively, the Ford government’s approach to nature is both confusing and contradictory. It’s valuable, until it’s in the way. And it’s worth protecting as long as people’s place in it is clearly defined. Natural spaces for the sake of nature — not to mention carbon sequestration, flood mitigation and the many other ecosystem services it provides — isn’t a goal for this government. 

The proof is in the literal weeds: in the time that this government has been in office, the auditor general has found there is no clear strategy for expanding the province’s natural areas, not enough staff in place to properly protect them and very little funding allocated to enable either. 

And even when action makes sense, its execution doesn’t. On Friday, the government announced a $4.75-million investment to rebuild and upgrade Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park in Mattawa, Ont., and turn it into a “year-round destination.” The park was devastated by a June storm, trapping campers and clearing swaths of forest. 

“The storm was one of the most severe events Ontario Parks has ever faced,” Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said in his announcement. What he didn’t say was that scientists predict such intense storms will increase in frequency due to global warming fuelled by the burning of fossil fuels. Rebuilding the park is good, but rebuilding it by prioritizing tourism over the climate resilience of such natural areas means they won’t last.

Bill 26 may be designed with good intentions, and Dowie certainly said all the right things at committee. “It will help ensure that access to nature is not to be determined by persons, postal code or income, but by the shared belief that nature should be reachable, welcome and meaningful, in effect democratic,” he told his colleagues. “Nature should be part of everyday life, not an occasional privilege, not one controlled by private landowners all the time, but truly a regular experience.” 

No one would disagree — including beachgoers at what used to be Wasaga Beach Provincial Park. But even if the Ford government facilitates the creation of new urban and adventure parks and fixes up damaged ones, their success depends on the protections that are offered to every park in the province. And when it comes to using the power of the law to ensure nature’s protection, the Ford government has proved more adept at bulldozing through it. 

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Splashed across the website of nearly every conservation authority in Ontario is a warning about low water levels. 

For nearly 80 years, the provincial agencies have been tasked with protecting public health and safety related to the province’s watersheds. That means safeguarding local drinking water sources and working to reduce the risks from natural hazards like flooding, erosion and drought. As Ontario’s population has grown, they have also been responsible for regulating development to minimize those risks, issuing permits only to those who pay attention to sustainable construction and growth.

Over the last six years, the Doug Ford government has passed four bills that have drastically changed the rules governing the 36 conservation authorities’ ability to do this job — all to speed up development. Those changes have included reducing conservation authorities’ influence over development, weakening their ability to protect water quality and wetlands and having their decisions be overruled by the overseeing minister.

Each change has come with an argument of efficiency, and since then, nearly all conservation authorities have publicly reported permits are being reviewed faster. Still, some 19 months after the last set of changes was imposed, the government has delivered yet another watershed change: it is proposing to consolidate 36 agencies into seven.

On Oct. 31, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy said individual conservation authorities were “operating largely on their own, with fragmented and outdated data systems and a patchwork of standards and service delivery.” This, he said, had led to “unpredictable and inconsistent turnaround times” for development permit approvals. 

“This is holding back Ontario,” he said.

“Obviously, there’s a fair bit of whiplash or scar tissue, pick your metaphor,” one conservation authority official from northern Ontario said. The Narwhal spoke with 12 people at 12 authorities for this story, many of whom asked to keep their names confidential for fear of retribution from the government. 

According to most of the sources, the threat to consolidate conservation authorities has been “the worst-kept secret” for a long time. It’s been talked about since this government took office, especially as Ford has previously moved to consolidate health care, and is rumoured to be planning the same for school boards. The consistent emphasis on efficiency and rapid development has kept conservation authorities in the crosshairs, as they strived to meet the government pressures without losing focus on their mandate to preserve Ontario’s watersheds and protect the public.

Currently, 26 out of 36 conservation authorities have staff closely monitoring worryingly low water levels in rivers and lakes across the province, with some declaring near-drought conditions brought on by a lack of rain. They’re doing this while they also grapple with the impacts of consolidation.

Consolidation of conservation authorities would be ‘a drastic shift’ that may ‘slow approvals, create confusion’

Despite assurances from McCarthy that they will all still be able to do this core job, there is deep skepticism among conservation authorities based on a historically fraught relationship and a litany of recent Progressive Conservative policies that have endangered Ontario’s water, forests and land. In 2023, two watchdog reports on the Greenbelt scandal found the Ford government had prioritized developer requests over environmental and technical considerations.

“The government is right to want a conservation authority system that is more consistent, transparent and efficient, especially when it comes to supporting housing and economic growth,” Jonathan Scott, a councillor for the town of Bradford West Gwillimbury and chair of the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority board, told The Narwhal. “There may be room for targeted, sensible consolidation in Ontario’s conservation system, but moving from 36 authorities to just seven would be a drastic shift.” 

Scott said the local environmental expertise in each individual authority is essential. “A merger of that scale could create a larger, more distant bureaucracy that is less responsive to local municipalities, developers and farmers — exactly the people who need timely service and value having a local municipal official or trusted member of staff they can call directly,” he said.

“Losing that connection could slow approvals, create confusion and ultimately have the opposite effect of what the government intends.”

The government’s proposal to consolidate conservation authorities has been posted on the Environmental Registry of Ontario for public feedback until Dec. 22. It includes three parts: create a central agency to manage conservation authorities, consult on the boundaries and governance structures of the newly proposed seven regional agencies and then create said agencies by spring 2026. Each proposal has sparked several concerns for conservation authority staff who are in the process of consulting with their municipalities and partners. 

As has been the case since June 2024, no one from the Ontario Ministry of Environment responded to questions from The Narwhal.

Consolidating conservation authorities means overseeing much larger and more complicated watersheds

Ford has been consistently touting the need for “made-in-Ontario” solutions to the province’s issues: conservation authorities are an example of just that. They were created by a Progressive Conservative government in 1946 in response to deforestation. They were strengthened to prevent repeats of the extreme flooding caused by Hurricane Hazel in 1954. While they were tasked with acquiring land for conservation and recreation, their main job has always been monitoring waterways for potential deadly floods, including by regulating development near waterways and wetlands, in flood plains and on Great Lakes shorelines. 

Today, all but five of the 36 conservation authorities are in heavily developed southern Ontario. 

Each authority was created to manage its own watershed, an area of land that drains all the streams and rainfall into a lake, bay or river. The government’s proposal to create seven conservation authorities is based only on the Great Lakes watersheds: Lake Erie, Lake Huron-Superior, Lake Ontario, divided into western, central and eastern and the St. Lawrence River. 

“It’s not a reduction; it’s a consolidation and an amalgamation, which means that all of the communities currently served by conservation authorities will continue to be served by conservation authorities,” Minister McCarthy said on Oct. 31. He repeatedly promised there will be no layoffs in this new structure, but managers will be redeployed as frontline staff.

Conservation authorities have consolidated before. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority was once four authorities, merged in 1957 to better manage a larger floodplain. Conservation Sudbury and Conservation Halton are both the result of similar mergers. 

Almost all of these consolidations were local decisions made by municipal governments based on specific watershed or development concerns. Earlier this year, municipalities dismissed the idea of merging the Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority with Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority, saying it would create more costs and less localized service. 

“Geography has always dictated policy,” an eastern Ontario official said. “I’m not sure that’s what’s happening now.”

Every authority oversees a different kind of environment, even if they seem nearby on a map. Water moves differently through varying landscapes and development rates, and the potential effects of flooding on the environment also vary based on geography.

Take the proposed Huron-Superior conservation authority. It would bring together seven authorities spanning roughly 1,400 kilometres and 78 municipalities from Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior through Bruce, Grey and Dufferin Counties, Simcoe County, York Region, Kawartha Lakes and Durham Region. The natural systems that feed Lake Huron, Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay differ significantly from those along the north shore of Lake Superior. Each has distinct geology, land use and flood-risk patterns.

“It’s no joke to say that large of a region is roughly the size of Switzerland, with very different conditions and needs,” Scott said. “The costs of integrating governance, technology and operations across such a vast area could easily outweigh any savings, while adding complexity and distance.”

Carl Jorgensen, general manager of Conservation Sudbury, said that in northern Ontario, conservation authorities are far from each other. That makes sharing resources extremely challenging.

“The work we do is very localized,” he said. “The government has provided so little so far on how this is actually going to be implemented; it’s really hard to figure out how these new regional conservation authorities will work.”

“But assuming local offices remain, with staff who can support and perform that frontline work efficiently, there’s no advantage to reducing 36 to seven.”

McCarthy insists that not much will change. “Conservation authorities will continue to deliver the programs and the services that they deliver today,” he said on Oct. 31. 

“Their mandate is not changing. The areas served by conservation authorities are not changing. Their funding is not changing. In fact, they will be better equipped than ever before to meet the changing needs of our communities.”

Conservation authority consolidation threatens their ‘localized approach, localized expertise’

Conservation authorities are governed by provincial law but they are created, funded and managed by municipal governments. Local elected municipal officials sit on the boards to oversee their work and budgets, the majority of which is paid by municipal taxes. Sometimes, municipalities send money to more than one authority because watershed boundaries differ from city or town limits.

“We’re not created equal,” one official from central Ontario told The Narwhal. Larger authorities have more money and more staff. “The system can be kind of dysfunctional and needs a shakeup, but the right kind of shakeup that gives all of us the resources we need to do the important work we do.”

Angela Coleman, executive director of Conservation Ontario, told The Narwhal she’s concerned that consolidation could alter longstanding relationships, something she hopes the advocacy organization can share during the consultation process. 

“One of the main drivers that we’re hearing is that municipalities provide funding through their levies, and because of that, representation and decision-making on conservation authority boards must be carefully structured to reflect those financial contributions,” she said.

There is little in the government’s proposal about what the governing boards of amalgamated conservation authorities would look like. But those doing math in their heads are worried about the creation of extremely large boards made up of twice the number of municipal officials currently appointed. Karen Nesbitt, policy director for the Association of Municipalities Ontario, told The Narwhal this would effectively “weaken local municipal leaders’ voice, leading to a major loss of local control over conservation and environmental protection in communities.” 

In an email to The Narwhal, Nesbitt said there is general support for streamlining and improving services. “However, we are seriously concerned about how this is being carried out,” she said. “The government is making major changes, but it is not providing any new, ongoing provincial funding to run conservation authorities effectively. Worse, this funding gap is being made harder to manage because the province is taking these steps simultaneously.”

Staff also worry about a reduced level of on-the-ground services. “We are the last vestiges of the Ontario Ministry of Environment,” an official from western Ontario said. “We’re the only ones still on the ground, accountable to our communities and serving them with science-based work. After consolidation, I don’t know how we can keep doing that.”

A new provincial agency will centralize decision-making and oversight over conservation authorities

The consolidation will come via the Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency, a new government organization that will “provide centralized leadership, efficient governance, strategic direction and oversight of Ontario’s conservation authorities.”

That includes helping to “streamline and standardize service delivery” and ensure the “consistent application of provincial standards” for flood risk assessment and management. The agency will also help update floodplain mapping and dam infrastructure and develop a “single, digital permitting platform.” 

But while the goals of the agency make sense on paper, conservation authority staff are questioning why consolidation is needed in addition to that. Many already collaborate extensively through shared programs, technical partnerships and joint projects, especially in remote and rural Ontario, where resources are limited. 

“If it were only about efficiency, mandate what hardware and software we should use, give us the money for it, impose certain standards on this and be done with it,” an eastern Ontario authority official said. “But this goes so much further than that. It’s not about efficiency; it’s about removing power from the communities and imposing control from above.” 

“There is no equivalent model in Ontario where people are being told they have to pay for a provincial agency to oversee them,” the official continued. “It’s bizarre … good technology can’t make up for bad governance.” 

Scott agreed. “If governance becomes more centralized under a provincial agency while local boards lose control, we could end up with a system where municipal dollars are being spent under provincial direction without municipal oversight,” he said. “That would be a fundamental change to how Ontario’s watershed management system has operated for nearly eighty years — and not, in my view, a change for the better.”

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The Doug Ford government wants to give itself the power to dictate more of the rules around how Ontario protects its drinking water.

The Ministry of Red Tape Reduction said the process in place to change the rules around drinking water is “overly complex and slow.” It said reforming that process will support housing construction and development, while keeping water safeguards in place.

But one expert said the move will take away power from local committees tasked with protecting their region’s water supply, centralizing it in the hands of the government.

If the government wants to beef up some local water protections, some tweaks to the process could be useful, according to Theresa McClenaghan, executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association. But without more details from the government clarifying how it will use its new powers, she added, it could also open the door to weaker public health protections down the road.

That’s a particularly ominous thought for some, coming 25 years after the Walkerton tragedy, which killed seven people and caused 2,300 more to become seriously ill, when the water supply in the town on the east side of Lake Huron became contaminated with E. coli from cattle manure.

Ontario Green Party leader Mike Schreiner said the changes amount to “reducing the power of independent, evidence-based experts and transferring that authority to the minister.”

“It certainly weakens the protections that were put in place out of the lessons learned from Walkerton,” he said in an interview. That includes the need for overlapping layers of protection.

“In the same way that we have a lot of redundancies around air traffic control … if something goes wrong here, you want to make sure there are other checks and balances. Because once you contaminate drinking water, you put people’s lives at risk.”

Red Tape Reduction Minister Andrea Khanjin’s office did not respond to questions from The Narwhal before publication.

Green Party: Walkerton showed the need for multiple levels of Ontario drinking water protection

On Oct. 20, Premier Ford’s Progressive Conservative government introduced Bill 56, the Building a More Competitive Economy Act. Among other things, the bill would change the Clean Water Act, a law put in place following a two-year inquiry into the disaster in Walkerton.

The Walkerton inquiry found the incident could have been prevented if a local official had properly monitored drinking water treatments — and if the Progressive Conservative government of the time, under Mike Harris, had not cut funding to the provincial Environment Ministry.

One solution that came out of the inquiry was to establish a series of regional plans to protect Ontario’s sources of drinking water.

The plans are locally developed and overseen by conservationists, public representatives and others. They identify groundwater and surface water flows around local drinking water supplies, the risks posed by things like industrial pollution or agricultural runoff and what rules should be in place to mitigate those risks.

There are now 19 committees overseeing 38 of these water protection plans across the province. The area each plan oversees is based largely on the conservation authorities in Ontario, along with two others that apply to areas of Georgian Bay and the Bruce Peninsula, and are tailored to the geology and hydrology of each area.

McClenaghan, of the Canadian Environmental Law Association, said the point of this decentralized system is to make sure that each region has practical rules that make sense for them, including for local businesses.

The Building a More Competitive Economy Act would change the law so the government can dictate more of the specific wording around drinking water rules in the protection plans, instead of leaving that to the committees, she said.

For example, the province could mandate standardized wording to ban animal manure from certain zones around water wells, the cause of the Walkerton tragedy, instead of letting the local committee describe that as it chooses, she said.

“Basically, from what I can see, it’s just substituting the current system with a more prescriptive approach,” she said.

“It will remove some flexibility and approach from the committees — and I’ll be quite keen to find out from committees if they think some of their current approaches wouldn’t be permitted.”

The province might also step in to block a water protection committee’s specific approach to dealing with a threat to its local water supply, McClenaghan said. But she added Ontarians won’t know specific details until the government clarifies its role. That won’t happen until the Building a More Competitive Economy Act, which is being debated in the legislature, is passed.

Schreiner said one of the lessons from Walkerton was the need to have a “multi-barrier approach” and the committees were set up “to take the politics out of it.”

Having a multi-step system in place to ensure companies can’t carry out activities with a high risk of contamination, he said, may have prevented the extent of the mercury poisoning that happened in Grassy Narrows First Nation, where drinking water has been contaminated for decades.

In a press release, the government said it wants to change the clean water law because current requirements like consultation periods and ministerial approval can take years for even “routine” projects with pre-defined protections, like replacing an existing well.

It said it would be “simplifying consultation” and “expanding what counts as a minor change” to the water protection plans. This would support “housing and infrastructure development,” the government claimed, while keeping “strong protections for source water in place” as well as “timely, effective safeguards for municipal drinking water sources.”

The changes are “streamlining” so that “unnecessary repetition” is avoided, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy told reporters the day the bill was introduced.

Ford plans to change both Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act

The government also said there would be upcoming changes to the Safe Drinking Water Act — a separate law that makes sure tap water can be consumed and establishes rules around water treatment — that would let new wells or intakes start supplying water while the protection plans were still being updated.

The Building a More Competitive Economy Act is not the first time the Ford government has enacted laws that may jeopardize the province’s drinking water protections, according to McClenaghan’s organization.

In a blog post from April, the Canadian Environmental Law Association said the two-year-old Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act, that allowed municipalities to more easily sprawl, could allow the use of ministerial zoning orders to bypass some drinking water protection rules.

And it said the More Homes Built Faster Act, introduced the year prior under Bill 23, limited the power of conservation authorities to stop developments that could harm water sources.

Ontario’s Auditor General released a report in March which found the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks doesn’t have the capacity to regularly inspect all 1,816 non-municipal drinking water systems it regulates.

Some communities in Ontario, like Six Nations of the Grand River, still do not have safe drinking water at all.

Meanwhile, the Ford government called on the federal government earlier this year not to entrench the right to clean drinking water in law.

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Ontario’s minister of natural resources now has broad powers to overrule environmental permitting decisions made by local conservation authorities about development projects. 

The regulation came into effect on Jan. 1, as part of the Doug Ford government’s new rules governing the public organizations that are uniquely tasked with overseeing whole-watershed protection in southern Ontario, in part by ensuring development occurs sustainably. 

Last February, the government amended the Conservation Authorities Act to reduce minimum distances between development lands and wetlands, and to weaken the authorities’ ability to protect water quality. The revised act also broadened some conservation authority powers to stop development that would worsen the impacts of natural hazards such as floods and wildfires. 

Notably, the new rules authorize Natural Resources Minister Graydon Smith to direct conservation authorities to issue, or not issue, development permits.

Smith previously told The Narwhal these powers would be “extremely limited, of course.” But the newest regulation gives the minister sweeping “discretionary” powers over development previously in the purview of conservation authorities, with one caveat: the minister must still consider “the same criteria concerning natural hazards and public safety that are considered by conservation authorities.”

The minister can exercise these new powers on a range of project types including housing, schools, long-term care homes, transportation infrastructure, sewage and water systems, energy projects, as well as certain proposals that could result in employment opportunities. And, finally, “Any other matter that, in the opinion of the minister, is in the provincial interest.”

The regulation also details how developers will gain new mechanisms to appeal conservation authority decisions, including asking the minister to greenlight them. Developers can also bypass conservation authorities and apply for a permit directly at the minister’s office; in this instance, the developer must justify why a minister’s permit is preferred over a conservation authority review.

Smith did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment on this story by publication time. 

This is just the latest effort by the Ford government to consolidate power in ministers’ offices that could be used to quash environmental concerns and fast-track development. The Progressive Conservatives have given the mining minister increased decision-making powers over exploration and mine closures. The government has also given its infrastructure minister the power to issue ministerial zoning orders, which were designed to override municipalities to expedite rezoning in critical circumstances, on the order of the housing minister. The Ford government has been found to overuse this power, giving the “appearance of preferential treatment,” according to Ontario’s auditor general. Last year, two watchdog reports on the scandal surrounding cuts to the protected Greenbelt area around Toronto found ministers and high-level bureaucrats prioritized developer requests over environmental and technical considerations. 

This latest regulation also comes among a slew of changes the Ford government has made to environmental oversight. Conservation authority officials have previously told The Narwhal the Ministry of Natural Resources has been stripped of its responsibility for evaluating how development proposals could affect wetlands. That job has been outsourced to private experts when needed and the criteria have been watered down. 

Many conservation authority staff have previously told The Narwhal this means the minister doesn’t have access to the environmental expertise needed to use these powers appropriately.

A representative from Conservation Ontario, the organization representing the province’s 36 authorities, did not provide a response by publication time.

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Editor’s note: On June 27, 2025, the Doug Ford government named Hassaan Basit as the province’s first chief conservation executive to help lead newly proposed changes to conservation authorities that “will create consistency, reduce costs and drive faster outcomes for the communities they serve.” Per the province’s press release, “these changes will support the government’s commitment to protect Ontario’s economy by speeding up critical infrastructure and housing development, while safeguarding the environment.”

Hassaan Basit began working for conservation authorities in 2004. By that time, the unique Ontario entities already had a storied history mitigating the impacts of climate change, ever since they were established in 1946 in response to severe flooding across the province.

“It was this great moment,” Basit said. “You’re looking at the post-World War Two boom when there are opportunities across North America, and here’s Ontario that can’t deal with a flooding issue. It’s getting in the way of sustained growth they knew was coming.” 

Back then, it was “a big deal” for the province — led by a Progressive Conservative government — and all its municipalities to come together and create a solution, especially one that wasn’t based on human-made geographical boundaries, but on natural boundaries: watersheds. Basit calls the authorities “one of Ontario’s best grassroots-led innovations,” which are widely credited with helping to reduce the impacts of floods and other natural hazards. 

Fast forward 80 years and Ontario is again grappling with intense growth, balancing the building of much-needed housing with minimizing flood risk and protecting land and wildlife. 

Basit is the outgoing CEO of Conservation Halton, which protects sprawling, natural spaces that knit together the rapidly growing communities of Burlington, Milton, Oakville and Halton Hills. He spent two decades with the organization, moving up the ranks to take the top role in 2017. 

Since then, he has become a pivotal figure in the standoff between conservation authorities and the current Progressive Conservative government, which has played out for the last five years. After the first round of cuts, he marched into then-environment minister Jeff Yurek’s office to demand an explanation, and ended up leading a working group made up of the authorities, municipalities, developers and the province that tried to chart a less combative and more collaborative way forward. 

As Ontario kept reducing the authorities’ powers — transferring oversight of their work from the Environment Ministry to Natural Resources — tensions continued, and Basit kept fighting, both on the frontlines and in back rooms. Along the way, he has engaged directly with Premier Doug Ford, even while the minister of natural resources continued to deliver blows.

The latest round of changes take effect April 1, when Natural Resources Minister Graydon Smith will gain the power to overrule conservation authority decisions and any conditions they place on building permits. Developers will be able to ask the minister to review permit denials and challenge the studies used to justify them. It will be easier to build docks and other small structures, even in places prone to floods, and the distance between development and sensitive shorelines and wetlands will be reduced. 

As Basit takes on a new role as city manager for Burlington, he sat down with The Narwhal to reflect on the relationship between conservation authorities and the province, and why Ontario needs the authorities to truly make it a place to grow. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

You have been working with conservation authorities for two decades. What do you think people still don’t fully understand about their role? 

Conservation authorities have some of the brightest minds working within them: people who understand flooding, water, weather patterns, drainage systems and hydrology … We were created as an environmental solution that is closely linked to economic and social gains or losses. The provincial government of the day gave us a toolkit, realizing that many things needed to be part of this solution, not just a hammer and a set of nails. 

You don’t let people build in floodplains where they’re going to lose their life and their property — that’s a no-brainer. We had all these tools to make sure we didn’t put concrete everywhere. Back then, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were tangible solutions that people could see: dams were being built, forests were being replanted, water quality and creeks were visibly becoming better. And we were growing economically. 

But when man-made impacts started accelerating, the job became tougher. Everybody started talking about climate change [in the 1990s] and it immediately got politicized. Guess who’s in the middle of it all? 

Conservation authorities. 

We were given a lot more to do, which we were capable of. But then [former Ontario Progressive Conservative premier] Mike Harris decided to cut our funding overnight by 80 per cent or something like that. What the province got wrong over subsequent decades, and continues to get wrong occasionally, is that you can’t just increase responsibilities, reduce funding and then walk away.

They cut the funding and abandoned the conservation authority child at the door of municipalities. They rang the door and ran off into the night. What do I mean by that? They stopped modernizing our policies to address the changing environmental and social landscape. And that’s when things started to fall apart. … So what we’ve ended up with today are archaic policies from the province. 

You’ve said wider discussions of climate change dragged conservation authorities into the government’s crosshairs. Is that the reason conservation authorities continue to find themselves in these battles with the government and the public? 

Anything innovative needs to be nurtured along the way for it to continue to be leading edge. Otherwise, it’ll fall apart.

The reason conservation authorities are in the crosshairs is because we haven’t had that open discourse with the province where we’ve said, ‘Here’s what we need to modernize and to stay in lockstep with today’s economic priorities.’ We haven’t been able to do that because the province doesn’t treat us like an actual partner.

They buy into the narrative they hear that we are working against Ontario’s ability to grow and develop … but this is from people who don’t always understand how a conservation authority works. Let me boil it down: conservation authorities exist to enable growth and development. That’s it. … There is no [conservation authority] that is anti-development.

The very reason we were created was so that the province can continue to grow and prosper, economically and socially, but in a way that doesn’t take away the right of future generations to do the same. In other words, sustainably. So you don’t grow and build something where you’re going to suffer losses due to flooding and erosion. That’s terrible. Nobody wants that. 

And we’re recognizing the value of the Ontario model today. Desjardins just announced it is pulling out of insuring homes in the floodplain [in Quebec]. The [Federal Emergency Management Agency] in the United States is now going to pay people money to take their homes out of the floodplain … rather than keep bailing them out financially after every disaster. We don’t have to do that in Ontario because of [conservation authorities].

There is still a very strong perception that conservation authorities create red tape and slow down development. Why have you struggled to shut down this narrative if what you say is true? 

Both things are true: conservation authorities are being forced to work beyond our legislative scope of responsibilities because climate change demands us to protect communities, but also because our provincial regulations haven’t been progressively updated to what they need to be today. It’s not 1965 anymore. Everyone is declaring climate emergencies. And when we tell them how to solve it, nobody wants to do that. 

That’s why, to the outside world, it may seem like we’re going beyond our scope … We’re desperate for modernization and looking for tools to be able to do the job better, but we don’t get the support where we need it, so we might occasionally contribute to the inconsistency of slower approvals. … There’s a grain of truth to all the criticism, but it’s not because we want to slow things down. It’s because we are trying to make sure we are getting it right without a playbook for how to deal with issues of today. 

How have you tackled the criticism at Conservation Halton? 

When I started the job we were issuing a permit within 30 days about 65 per cent of the time, which isn’t a great performance. Now we issue permits in 30 days, 98 per cent of the time. That took eight years. 

What Conservation Halton does and what a lot of other [conservation authorities] are doing today is sitting down with developers and saying, ‘Okay, what you are proposing to build may not get you an approval. However, let’s see how we get there … Let’s see if we can get this to a yes.’

Do you think the Ford government has made it difficult for conservation authorities to do their job? 

You know, [conservation authorities] are willing to make sacrifices. They’re willing to make changes. But they need a partner. 

This government, when they truly engaged with conservation authorities, they’ve been really fantastic partners. We’ve been able to put multiple stakeholders around the table and actually solve environmental-related regulatory issues. Then things changed. People come in and out and the relationship changes and we get back into this zone … of 4:30 p.m., Friday-before-a-long-week-end changes. 

It’s been a mixed bag. Politically, it’s been some of the most transformative engagements in the last decade and also some of the most frustrating.

Good transformative or bad? Has the engagement enabled conservation authorities to be solution seekers and help the province grow sustainably while also protecting the environment? 

Yes and no. The Ford government has harmonized regulations … and that will help. If it helps with nothing else, it’ll help with that narrative from people who have seen one [conservation authority] allow something and another doesn’t. Now, there are underlying scientific reasons for that: even if we build absolutely homogenous cities, the landscape is different everywhere we build. Just because the houses look the same doesn’t mean the environments are the same. So there are good reasons, but there have been inconsistencies. And one regulation might help. 

And then there are some pieces like the minister’s authority to override permits. It’s been on the books for a long time and we question the need for it. Why not address the root causes rather than give yourself that judge-jury power? That’s troubling. 

You need to go back to what kind of permits [conservation authorities] issue: the goal is to prevent loss of life and property. That can never be forgotten … this isn’t about building height. It isn’t about aesthetics. It isn’t about the number of parking spaces. It isn’t about changing the character of a neighborhood. It is about, ‘If you build here, you increase the potential of somebody living in that new space that you’ve approved … potentially losing their lives or exacerbating the risk of floods and other hazards.’ 

What the government needs to understand is conservation authorities are not yet another regulator. We are the first regulator. If a space is not safe to build, nothing else really matters. 

We’re not a stakeholder, as far as I’m concerned, of the province. We’re not someone you give a heads up to or put on a checklist of calls. No, you need to start with us. Bring us into that conversation. We’re an extension of the province. We need to be at the table with you because we are in the field along with municipalities.

When this government brought in the working group, which was very much a roundtable, we achieved some major modernization successes … Did everyone agree with everything? No. But with proper dialogue, with agreement on the problem we were trying to solve, everybody understood why we decided what we decided. 

There isn’t one solution. The province should stop walking around with a hammer and a bunch of nails in their pockets. 

I know you’ve spoken to Premier Doug Ford directly about the role and value of conservation authorities. Do you believe he understands it? 

Yes, I think the premier understands the value of conservation authorities. He understands universal concepts that are important to Ontarians: clean water, clean air and safe communities from natural hazards. And he doesn’t want to compromise on that. 

I think of the premier as an innovator and I think innovators can get it wrong every now and then. But I think it’s at the ministry level that so many things are impacted. The minister has a lot of power … I’ve seen the pendulum swing with only that one person changing over the last few years: that’s the minister [of natural resources]. The premier always says the buck stops with him, but in many cases it’s with the minister or the people that are advising them. So much depends on their persona and how sincerely they want to engage. 

Every time the province has tried to take a shortcut, like slashing the power of conservation authorities, and saying somebody else now has to do it, that somebody else has been a municipality. That has led to and will continue to lead to slower processes and increased costs for developers and taxpayers. If you think that 36 [conservation authorities] doing something in the entire province is a recipe for inconsistency, I don’t see how over 444 municipalities doing that thing make things better. It doesn’t. 

You’ve been a megaphone for conservation authorities. What gives you hope now, and what fears do you have as you’re leaving? 

It’s been a team effort. Other conservation authorities have done the work too. We rely on each other. We know what our own problems are, and we’re acknowledging and facing them together … Conservation authorities are 100 times more important today. If there’s a problem, we’ll bring you 10 solutions. 

But we need meaningful engagement for that. We needed the working group after the second election to keep the momentum; that never happened. Instead we got Bill 23. That’s what I fear: which door will the province keep open? One of unilateralism, where they understand so little of the very technical aspects of our work or the boots-on-the-ground experience we have, and make arbitrary decisions? Or are they going to work together? 

Sometimes I think the province feels that in order for them to go fast they must just make the decisions. Every time they’ve done that on the environmental file, its not worked out. 

You cannot put a chain link fence around the environment and assume that if people stay out it’ll be fine. That’s not what conservation authorities do. Our job is to say ‘Here’s the environment. Come build in it and live in it. Come play and farm on it and use it to its maximum potential without crossing the line where that land is no longer available to us and to future generations.’ 

That’s a very tough job. We’re not in the business of saying no. We’re in the business of saying yes, but learning from that and adjusting things. That’s why we’re always in the firing line. We ask a lot of questions to help figure out how close we can get to the line. And we could do it better if everyone, including conservation authorities and the province, show humility and engage as partners. 

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Ontario’s minister of natural resources will soon have the power to overrule — or bypass — environmental oversight bodies to greenlight development.

The powers are codified in new regulations governing conservation authorities, which are unique to Ontario: for nearly 80 years, they have overseen and protected the province’s southern watersheds, in part by ensuring development occurs sustainably. 

Released last month, the new Conservation Authorities Act rules do broaden some conservation authority powers by allowing them to stop development that threatens to worsen the impacts of a natural hazard such as floods, droughts and wildfires. But the changes also weaken their ability to protect water quality, reduce the distance between development lands and wetlands, and eliminate the need to acquire permits before building certain small structures. 

Notably, the new rules strip away some of their powers by authorizing Natural Resources Minister Graydon Smith to issue development permits without conservation authority review. This is the second time in five years the Doug Ford government has attempted to weaken conservation authorities through legislation — although it hasn’t always been successful.  

The minister is now empowered to direct conservation authorities to issue, or not issue, permits for development. Smith will also be able to change conditions a conservation authority might place on a permit — such as altering construction plans to better manage water intake or requiring regular reports. Developers will gain new mechanisms to appeal conservation authority decisions, including asking the minister to review them. 

The goal, according to the rules, is to create “a clear and streamlined permitting process.” But experts say the minister’s new powers, combined with these changes, could do the opposite. 

“It’s a pretty strange choice,” Laura Bowman, a lawyer with Ecojustice, told The Narwhal. “Conservation authorities have very detailed expertise in the management of their watershed. To take that out of their hands and put it in the hands of a minister and his staff who don’t know anything about the environment … it’s just going to cause chaos.”

The new Conservation Authorities Act regulations don’t clearly define when and how the minister could use these powers. Minister Smith told The Narwhal these powers would “of course, be extremely limited.” 

“Conservation authorities do a great job at protecting people and keeping them safe,” he said at the Ontario legislature on Tuesday. “We really just wanted to streamline that regulation down.”

But the broadness of the regulations makes many nervous, especially when considered in light of other environmental oversight changes made by the Ford government. Along with the previous weakening of conservation authorities, the Ministry of Natural Resources has been stripped of its responsibility for evaluating how development proposals could affect wetlands: that job has been outsourced to private experts when needed and the criteria have been watered down. 

Many conservation authority staff say this means the minister doesn’t have access to the environmental expertise needed to use these powers appropriately.

“The minister better staff up if he wants to tell us what to do,” Tim Byrne, head of Essex Region Conservative Authority in-between Lake Erie and the Detroit River, told The Narwhal. “And as for overruling us or appealing our decisions, well fuck you, minister. Based on what?” 

“When you’re dealing with property issues, you have to balance private interests with public and environmental safety. Will the minister do that or weigh one over the other? We can all guess the answer.” 

After this story was published, Byrne sent The Narwhal a statement to “sincerely apologize” for his comments. “Having devoted 38 years to ensuring that people and property are protected from flooding and erosion, I was extremely upset to learn that Conservation Authorities’ ability to continue doing this important work had been further eroded,” he said in an email. “Notwithstanding, I regret my use of inappropriate language and any embarrassment it has caused the Minister, my Board of Directors, fellow conservation authorities, and staff.” 

Issuing a permit without conservation authority review “would open the [minister’s] door to requests,” Rob Baldwin, head of Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority, said. “Do they want that? It all comes down to how they use it and for what.” Last year, two watchdog reports on the Greenbelt scandal found the government had prioritized developer requests over environmental and technical considerations.

The Narwhal spoke to several experts — including 13 conservation authority staff — who say this move is especially concerning because it is part of a bigger trend, in which the Ford government appears to be devaluing expert opinions to make unilateral decisions. Many described this new power as similar to minister’s zoning orders — a mechanism Ford’s Housing Ministry has used more often than any other previous government to override planning regulations. The Ford government has also given the mining minister powers to approve exploration and closures, decisions that used to be made by technical experts.

“What is reflected here is still a lack of understanding of conservation authority expertise and a lack of appreciation for them,” Bowman said. 

The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority told The Narwhal in an email that it “will continue to offer scientific and policy advice to the minister if we are made aware that the use of such powers is being considered.”

A ‘mixed bag’ of changes, including policies that will ‘squeeze’ wetlands between development: experts

These new regulations close the chapter on an early Ford government promise. Conservation authorities, which are staffed by ecologists, biologists, hydrologists, species-at-risk specialists and other experts, have been bracing for new rules since Ford took power in 2018 and vowed to streamline the planning process. Over the last six years, the authorities have tried to work with the government to maintain environmental oversight of development. Instead, the Progressive Conservatives have subjected these bodies to a series of legislative changes that have gone forward despite great pushback. 

The government has proposed empowering the minister of natural resources to approve development applications twice: in 2020, with Bill 229, and again in 2022 with Bill 23, the More Homes Built Faster Act. Bill 23 led the head of Ontario’s species-at-risk agency to resign in protest. Even developers expressed concerns, warning of “unintended consequences” if the industry can’t depend on conservation authority expertise to help protect homes and cities from natural hazards.

Still, the new regulations take effect on April 1 and seemingly ignore some of these concerns to present what many say is a “mixed bag” of changes. 

One new rule causing significant worry is a change to the distance required between development lands and wetlands. Known as a “setback,” such buffer zones are important to protect property from flooding and habitat from pollution or erosion. Ontario’s historical minimum of 120 metres will be changed to just 30 metres. The impacts of the reduced setback on water and the surrounding environment will now be determined on a case-by-case basis, likely creating additional work for many authorities.

Patricia Chow-Fraser, a biologist and professor at McMaster University, believes this “shortsighted” move will harm species at-risk, some of which move 50 metres or more between water and land daily. Breaking apart wetlands endangers them, she said. “Under these rules, we’ll be squeezing them in an urbanized centre and that is the wrong way to go,” she told The Narwhal. 

The new rules also exempt minor construction — docks, patios, decks, hot tubs and garages — from conservation authority permit requirements for the very first time, even in flood zones. Minister Smith told The Narwhal the change is meant to allow people “to do very low-risk activity and get a permit.” 

But Geoff Cade, water and planning manager at Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority — Ontario’s first, on the southeastern shores of Lake Huron — worries too many small structures built on shorelines without oversight could become a problem. “[The new] regulation allows these structures to be built in areas that were underwater a couple of years ago” when high water levels caused severe flooding, he said.

The government hasn’t provided reasoning or risk assessment for its new exemptions, but Byrne, whose region is the most flood-prone in the province, has his own opinion. 

“These exemptions have nothing to do with the natural environment but to help build things for people’s enjoyment and in the long term increase the threat of flooding,” Byrne said. “Why would you allow additional kinds of development in flood zones? Even if it’s small, it just doesn’t make sense.”

Still, most conservation authority staff who spoke to The Narwhal are “pleasantly surprised” that the government has walked back its broad-scale attack. On paper, the rules give authorities greater powers to stop development that is likely to have harmful impacts, including the power to independently (“and responsibly,” Baldwin said) stop development in a floodplain, a provincially significant wetland or on sensitive river banks — though it is unclear if the minister can intervene in such decisions. 

The rules also empower conservation authorities to enforce greater fines for those egregiously harming the environment during construction. “It changes the playing field of deterrence,” Baldwin said. 

“These regulations aren’t as dramatic as we all feared,” Bowman said. “But [conservation authorities’] role has been severely undermined and all for what end? To have a slightly more constrained and environmentally limited permitting process?”“This is just setting the stage for a bunch of new problems rather than addressing the problem the government has been talking about — slow development.”

New Conservation Authorities Act rules give developers more power to appeal permit denials

Before Bill 23, each of Ontario’s 36 conservation authorities was governed by its own regulations. The Ford government consolidated those regulations to ensure consistency, limiting the authorities’ focus to natural hazard prevention instead of overall watershed health. Cade said this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t consider that rural and urban conservation authorities have different environmental landscapes and issues. 

“As we try to create some ubiquitous landscape in terms of legislation, you risk losing local knowledge and scientific expertise and local characteristics of the natural world each of us is regulating,” Cade told The Narwhal. 

“What I oversee is very different than the Greater Toronto Area.The development pressures are different.” His current concerns include gentrification, as small cottages on the Lake Huron shoreline morphing into big, permanent homes, and increased construction of large-scale migrant worker housing on farms. 

The Narwhal reached out to all 36 authorities and heard back from 11, all of which were scrambling to understand the impacts of this latest round of changes and quickly implement them over the next three weeks. That includes redoing public maps to show the new buffer zones and identify floodplains, as well as revamping permit applications. 

It’s a hefty job, they all say. 

“We accept the changes but April 1 is a pipe dream,” Doug Hevenor, head of Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority, which oversees the region south of Georgian Bay, said. “Five years, we’ve played a changing game: reload and reunderstand. And we’re still playing it now.” 

In addition to empowering the minister to greenlight development, the new Conservation Authorities Act regulations have changed the scope of what an authority can consider in reviewing development applications. It also speeds up their timeline.  

The regulations still allow conservation authorities to consider the impacts of development on flooding, erosion and beaches to minimize harm to people and property. However, they can no longer consider the impact of development on water pollution at all, even though a key function of healthy wetlands is water filtration. 

And while some conservation authority powers have increased, developers also have new powers: they can request a minister’s review on a permit denial or conditions. They can also appeal decisions, or the failure to make one within 90 days, at the Ontario Land Tribunal. Appeals can now centre on disputing studies used by conservation authorities in making a decision. 

While some disputes might be handled more efficiently now, authority staff say, others could delay development instead of speeding it up. Altogether, the changes may make decision-making “more piecemeal and arbitrary,” Bowman said. “It’s going to result in a weirdly arbitrary, narrow process.” 

Still, many conservation authority heads are trying to stay “cautiously optimistic.” 

“Hopefully this was the last change for a while,” Baldwin said. “We’ve never been against the government trying to facilitate infrastructure or building homes. Our mandates are supportive of each other.” 

“These regulations might be a new status quo. And we’ll figure it out — because we have to.” 

— With files from Emma McIntosh

Update March 7, 2024, at 3:53 p.m.: This story has been updated to include additional comments from Tim Byrne, head of Essex Region Conservation Authority.

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Speaking to a lunchtime audience at the Toronto Region Board of Trade on Tuesday, Premier Doug Ford pitched a new plan he said would help tackle Ontario’s housing crisis.

“It will make it easier to build the right type of housing in the right places,” he told industry stakeholders, with a grin.

But Ford didn’t say his plan depends in part on a massive gutting of conservation authorities, which oversee and protect vital and deteriorating watersheds.

To understand the scope of the Ford government’s changes, The Narwhal sat in on a media briefing and read the proposed legislation. It also reviewed an internal government document, which was shared with some stakeholders Tuesday before being leaked to The Narwhal. Although the government did not respond to a number of questions from The Narwhal about the internal document, it released its legislation late on Tuesday afternoon, confirming a number of key revelations about Ford’s actual plan.

The legislation will repeal 36 specific regulations that allow conservation authorities to directly oversee the development process. If passed, it would mean Ontario’s conservation authorities will no longer be able to consider “pollution” and “conservation of land” when weighing whether they will allow development. 

The government is also seeking to force the agencies to issue permits for projects that are subject to a “Community Infrastructure and Housing Accelerator,” a new tool that allows the province to expedite zoning changes. It will limit authorities’ ability to weigh in on developments to issues of “natural hazards.”

The changes are aimed at reducing the “financial burden on developers and landowners making development-related applications and seeking permits” from conservation authorities, the leaked document says. 

The Ford government repeatedly denied Tuesday that the role of conservation authorities was being diminished. Yet under the new proposed rules, conservation authorities would also be compelled to identify and give up any land they hold that could be “suitable for housing.”

Ontario’s planning system has many players: the provincial government, 444 regional and local municipalities and 36 conservation authorities. Of these, the ones most directly tasked with looking out for animals, land and environment during the planning process are conservation authorities. And today, for a second time since taking office, the Ford government seems to have taken direct aim at them — and so, the environment — with some key legislative changes.

Here’s a breakdown of how it all works now, what the Ford government is changing and what the environmental repercussions could be. 

What are Ontario’s conservation authorities?

Conservation authorities are local agencies that manage watersheds. They’re unique to Ontario, and deeply rooted in its history.

They were actually created under a Progressive Conservative government, led by Premier George Drew, in 1946. At the time, habitat degradation by settlers was starting to take a toll. Much of it was due to deforestation: the roots of trees anchor soil and without plant cover that soil can quickly erode and dry out. Deforested areas are also more prone to flooding. Environmental groups and the province wanted to address those problems not just on the city level, but by looking at watersheds as a whole, and so conservation authorities were formed.

Then came Hurricane Hazel in 1954, which washed away homes that had been built on floodplains and killed 81 Ontarians. The province expanded conservation authorities’ power, tasking them with monitoring waterways for potential floods, in hopes of preventing a similar tragedy in the future. They were also given the ability to acquire land for conservation and recreation — and to regulate development near waterways, on Great Lakes shorelines and by the inland lakes and wetlands connected to watersheds they oversee. 

Today, the province has 36 conservation authorities, and all but five are in heavily-developed southern Ontario. Though their duties are set out in provincial regulations, they’re more closely intertwined with municipal governments, which contribute a significant chunk of their funding and appoint members — usually municipal councillors — to each agency’s board of directors. 

Ironically, the government’s internal document about the latest changes acknowledges the positive impact of conservation authorities, noting that “the federal Parliamentary Budget Office has credited Ontario’s floodplain and hazard management policies and programs, including the role of [conservation authorities], with keeping losses associated with flooding in Ontario lower than losses seen in other Canadian provinces.”

What powers do Ontario’s conservation authorities have? 

Conservation authorities in Ontario serve as bridges between various parts of the development planning process and the players involved. 

“Conservation authorities try to connect the dots in a very complicated land-use planning process,” former Toronto Region Conservation Authority head Brian Denney told The Narwhal. The authorities help municipalities navigate dozens of policies and legislative instructions, making sure the puzzle pieces fit together around watershed protection goals. They work to prevent severe impacts on the watershed that could harm human health or biodiversity across the province. 

“But conservation authorities are always respectful of the fact that land-use planning is the realm of municipalities with overall direction from the province,” Denney said. 

One key part of what conservation authorities do is oversee natural heritage systems — sections of land that allow plants and animals to move from one area to another. That’s especially important as the climate crisis escalates: not only are migration paths disappearing, but more species are moving north into Ontario and beyond, needing safe corridors. Tuesday’s legislation mentions changes to natural heritage systems, but doesn’t provide details. 

“We used to sort of isolate, protect patches of landscape,” said Victor Doyle, a former provincial planner credited as one of the architects of the protected Greenbelt. “But if they’re not connected, then plants and animals can’t survive. They inbreed and they die out. They need to be connected.”

There are different layers of natural heritage systems: some are laid out in provincial legislation, like the one that created the Greenbelt, or defined by municipalities, Doyle said. Each conservation authority also has a natural heritage system, Doyle added, scooping up smaller wetlands, woodlands and other natural features important to watersheds that aren’t protected in the high-level provincial system.

Doyle thinks of natural heritage systems as parts of the same body: if the provincial ones are torsos and biceps, municipal and conservation authority ones are like hands and fingers. “The little ones won’t survive without the big ones, and the big ones won’t survive without the little ones,” he added.

Over the years, natural heritage systems have been a tension point when developers apply to open up land that isn’t eligible for urban development, Doyle said. In some cases, these applications end up at backlogged tribunals.

“A lot of this time is taken up because developers are pushing the envelope so hard to push the natural heritage system back,” Doyle said. 

What could change with the Ford government’s new legislation?

A lot. 

Taken as a whole, the plan is aimed at not just increasing development, but density — something that could be positive, as sprawling car-reliant suburbs tend to eat up farmland and produce air pollution and carbon emissions. But it also attempts to water down or completely eradicate various environmental checks and balances on development.

One official who has seen the document leaked to The Narwhal said the government is proposing “a lot of loopholes to make the system work for developers.” The document outlines the broad strokes of proposals, but provides little detail. 

For one, Minister of Natural Resources Graydon Smith told reporters Tuesday that conservation authorities are “the second largest land owner after the Crown” and have been asked to “evaluate” their land to identify areas of development. But Smith was vague beyond that, assuring that conservation authorities “would still play the role they were born to play, which is [to] protect property from flooding and natural hazards, areas where potential erosion can take place.”  

Smith also said the province doesn’t know how much conservation authority-owned land could actually be suitable for development. “But we all need to be making sure we’re doing our part to achieve this goal of building more homes,” Smith told reporters.

Other changes outlined in the document obtained by The Narwhal include limiting conservation authorities’ comments to specific aspects of developments, like natural hazards or the protection of drinking water. Some of their permitting abilities will be downloaded to municipalities. 

There is also an unspecified proposal to “amend and streamline” the way wetlands are evaluated for development — in the technical briefing, a government official said changes would be aimed at offsetting development pressure on wetlands and reverse Ontario’s decades-long trend of wetland loss.

The legislation cuts the time citizens and companies have to appeal conservation authorities’ decisions to deny permits from 120 days to 90. It freezes the fees that developers pay conservation authorities when applying for permits.

The government is also giving itself more power: it will now be allowed to review and change any conditions that a conservation authority might place on a permit.

The goal, according to the leaked document, is to create “consistent and easy-to-understand rules [that] will assist the development sector in providing new housing and will also benefit agricultural producers and existing homeowners who want to do work on their properties as well as provide clear direction to conservation authorities.”

Can conservation authorities influence housing development in Ontario? 

The short answer: not to the extent many people think. 

Ontario’s conservation authorities largely play an advisory role in the municipal planning process. This role has two main tasks. 

The first is indeed regulatory, reviewing development applications and granting permits to proposals that meet requirements to build safely and sustainably near or in wetlands, floodplains and other natural hazard zones. Each application comes at a cost to developers and requires complicated paperwork and engaging in extensive back and forth. 

“So when the government tells us to get back to their core mandate, it’s just another way of saying, from a developer’s perspective, that they want conservation authorities to get out of the way,” Denney said.

The second is to offer technical expertise and advice to municipalities on projects proposed near natural heritage systems or other ecological habitats, or which require stormwater infrastructure installation or upgrades. 

“Conservation Authorities can be an easy scapegoat [for governments] because it’s an extra layer, an extra body, an extra approval that’s required before shovels can go into the ground,” said Kellie McCormack, Conservation Halton’s director of planning and regulations, said. “But we’re here to make sure that development is done in a sustainable manner, and that there’s no risk to life and property. We’re not out to stop development.”  

The important thing to remember is that not every development application is reviewed by a conservation authority, explains McCormack. Much of the time, it’s after a request from municipalities that don’t have their own ecologists, engineers, water researchers or environmental planners on staff. 

Conservation Halton, for example, has an agreement with the Region of Halton to provide ecological review for planning applications, said McCormack. She said conservation authorities are able to look at development “from a much higher world view, beyond municipal borders” to ensure development doesn’t disrupt the whole natural system of a provincial region. 

The climate crisis makes that role more crucial: also on Tuesday, the Insurance Bureau of Canada put out a press release stating the “urgent need” for the housing industry and governments to more openly consider and disclose “natural hazard and climate risk … because of the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters.”

Without “immediate action … catastrophic loss to homes and communities will continue to increase in severity and cost, year after year,” the bureau’s vice-president, climate change and federal issues, Craig Stewart, was quoted as saying.  

In the end, conservation authorities don’t make final decisions about development; that’s up to municipalities.

“The role of conservation authorities is to try and make sure houses aren’t going to be swept away in a flood or fall over the Scarborough Bluffs,” Denney said. “It’s an important part of the process.” 

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Last December, Hassaan Basit was awaiting the passage of an omnibus bill by the Doug Ford government that would limit Ontario’s conservation efforts. 

As the CEO of Halton Region Conservation Authority, Basit was concerned about a number of proposals in the bill, including one amendment that could disempower conservation authorities like his in matters of development across wetlands.

Then, on the eve of the bill’s passage, he got a phone call. 

It was then-environment minister Jeff Yurek asking Basit if he would help figure out how conservation authorities could work with and implement the new regulations. 

That phone call marked a turning point in the contentious relationship between the Doug Ford government and conservation authorities.

Basit was pleasantly surprised. Just four months prior, the government had sent Ontario’s 36 conservation authorities — who operate more than 500 conservation areas, and oversee everything from wildlife management to floodplain mapping and monitoring, to watershed protections and more — a letter ordering a “wind down” of all unnecessary programming, as part of its broad efforts to eliminate Ontario’s deficit. 

The letter identified these activities as zip-lining, maple syrup festivals, kayaking, photography and wedding permits — all sorely needed revenue-generating activities.

“For far too long, our conservation authorities have strayed from their mandate. That’s why we have flooding in basements,” Government House Leader Paul Calandra said in a November 2020 question period when asked about this move. “What we’re doing is strengthening conservation authorities to … bring it back to its core mandate.”

At no point did the government acknowledge that earlier that year it had slashed conservation authorities’ funding for flood management programs — part of their core mandate — in half.

“It was just odd to get that out of the blue,” Basit said of the letter. “It was very surprising and unreasonable. The concern was that this signaled some sort of intent to use legislative tools to force conservation authorities to basically stop working.” 

Basit and fellow conservation heads came together to write a letter of their own to the premier, one that was also signed by almost every mayor across the province. In it, they outlined their deep concern. This note and the public outcry that followed nudged the province to back off a bit, taking time to consult with all 36 conservation authorities. Basit even went to Yurek’s Bay Street office to have a frank conversation about the actual improvements and changes the conservation authorities needed. Despite all this, the bill passed as is.

For Basit, the phone call that came four months after this meeting, asking him to head a working group for these regulations, was a rare act of “sincerity” and “a willingness to collaborate” from the Ontario government — a complete 180 degree-shift from an otherwise tense and imperfect relationship. For many in the conservation space, the working group would be the very first time they had a clear channel of communication with a Ford government minister, a space to explain the impact of some of the proposed environment and conservation changes. 

Since January, the Conservation Authorities Working Group has biweekly brought together conservation experts, developers, urban planners, agricultural representatives and two consecutive provincial environment ministers. They’ve combed through the nuts and bolts of the new regulations that were buried deep within omnibus budget Bill 229 — regulations that led to the mass resignation of seven members of the Ontario Greenbelt Council who are appointed to advise the environment minister on land management in the Greenbelt area that overlaps several conservation authorities. These new rules, known as Schedule 6, were posited to modernize and streamline the mandate of conservation authorities, but in reality would have made their work more complicated and less effective.

For example, one of the key roles of a conservation authority is to provide independent oversight and review of development over floodplains and wetlands. Schedule 6 empowers the minister of natural resources and forestry to approve any development project with no input from them.

In the lead up to the passage of the bill, government ministers used troubling language to justify the need for the proposed changes, most of which relegated environmental protections below economic and development interests. In November 2020, Yurek told the legislature that the changes were needed because “conservation authorities were going beyond the rules and regulations of the province and instituting their own rules.” In fact, since 1946 conservation authorities have been empowered by provincial legislation to, first and foremost, protect Ontario’s natural environments. That has included having significant input in development proposals that may negatively impact wetlands or floodplains. 

With cities like Caledon and Brampton, which have the highest growth trajectories in the Greater Toronto Area, already exploding into their agriculturally rich regions, conservation authorities are facing increasing pressure to yield to development despite its impact on natural environments.

Despite the tense lead-up, Basit said the working group has been “constructive.” He set the tone for their work early on, by asking everyone to focus on problem-solving over politics: the group had to learn to move past their anger that the government had passed the legislation and work to refine the way the regulations would be implemented to make them as effective and feasible as possible. Its main task was to clearly define the work of conservation authorities so that funding negotiations are easier and future pushback is limited.

The feedback about the working group is overwhelmingly positive. Kim Gavine, head of Conservation Ontario, the group that represents all 36 conservation authorities, said the group discussions are “honest, productive.” Sommer Casgrain-Robertson, general manager of the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority, said the group “has completely changed our working relationship with the provincial government.” Carl Jorgensen, head of Conservation Sudbury, said the collaboration and its results were “refreshing.” 

In October, the government released the initial phase of regulations that, for the first time, clearly lay out all the work conservation authorities do, without being overly prescriptive. Casgrain-Robertson said one of the biggest outcomes of the group was “just raising the knowledge level of the ministry about conservation authorities, what we do, how we operate.” Two more phases of regulations still need to be worked through, which get into more technical things like what programs they can charge fees for and how they will administer their authority over development permits around key natural environments. 

Members of the working group who spoke to The Narwhal said that a lot of credit for the success of the working group goes to Yurek, who made himself fully available to their sessions every two weeks. (Yurek’s office declined to speak to The Narwhal for this story.)

Halfway through the process, a cabinet shuffle led to a change at the helm when David Piccini took over as environment minister, but group members say no momentum was lost. In fact, Piccini delivered some bonus victories.

David Piccini steps in as Ontario’s environment minister

In an interview with The Narwhal, Piccini said he was mindful to “immerse” himself and “nerd out” over the history and work of conservation authorities so he could be a collaborative member of the group. 

That history and work is vast. Ontario’s conservation authorities were created almost 75 years ago in response to concern about the environmental impact of a growing population. Collectively, all 36 conservation authorities are the second largest land-owner in the province after the Crown, in charge of 150,000 hectares of land. They are the envy of conservators around the world because each authority takes care of a whole watershed rather than areas dictated by municipal borders. After the disastrous impact of Hurricane Hazel in 1954, conservation authorities took on the work of flood-mitigation efforts. After the Walkerton tragedy in 2002, they have also been responsible for implementing the Clean Water Act. 

Conservation Ontario describes them as agencies that aim to balance “human, environmental and economic needs” in collaboration with all levels of government, landowners and many other organizations. Many describe the work of conservation authorities as akin to giving the natural world a seat at the table.

“I come from a rural community so I know how important conservation authorities are,” said Piccini, who represents the riding of Northumberland-Peterborough South. Even before he became environment minister, Piccini co-hosted an engagement session in his riding with Yurek to discuss the new regulations. He said that he heard from his constituents about the challenges of a growing community that wants continued access to and protection of the natural environment.

Piccini said he and his dog Max are frequent users of the trail system managed by conservation authorities. It’s a system he saw was being used more and more by Ontarians during pandemic lockdowns, which is why he pushed to include passive recreation — hiking, fishing, canoeing and even maple syrup events, once seen as “unnecessary programming” by his government — as one of the mandatory services conservation authorities provide.

In listening to the working group’s conversations about passive recreation, Piccini said he learned that managing them was done differently around the province. Adding it to the list of core programs would mean conservation authorities don’t have to explain and defend these programs at every budget meeting with a municipality.

“Maintaining public access to nature, regardless of background, regardless of where you are in life, everyone should get to go out and enjoy our trail system,” Piccini said. 

To guarantee this, he sees the province’s future role with conservation authorities as that of a collaborator.“You’ve got to listen, and you’ve got to engage,” he said. “I think we found the right balance here of the province engaging with the working group, different players and different competencies, but also empowering municipalities to make informed decisions.”

“I’ve been doing this job for 17 years and I’ve worked with lots of governments … and both of these ministers have been really involved in this, which has been extremely helpful,” Basit said. “They’ve been very blunt about what they’ve heard but they’ve also given me an opportunity to work with them and explain the context and then made final decisions.“ 

While Basit says that the “heavy lifting” is over, there’s still more work to be done. 

What the new Ontario conservation authority regulations say — or don’t say

One of the main points of contention in the new regulations was that government officials didn’t seem clear about what exactly conservation authorities should do, what should be funded by various levels of government and what should be left to conservation authorities to fundraise or generate revenue for. 

To address this, the working group helped the government create three clearly defined categories of programs and services. The first are mandatory programs that are in line with provincial priorities like the protection of core watersheds and drinking water sources, and the mitigation of natural hazard risks. 

The second two categories pertain to more local programs, like tree-planting, water quality monitoring and stewardship programs. This will require each conservation authority to develop agreements with each municipality in its region, detailing what is being offered, at what cost and how it will help the community. These agreements, a brand new requirement, need to be finalized by 2024. 

As onerous as it sounds for 36 conservation authorities to develop agreements with 444 Ontario municipalities, Basit said these are “administrative exercises” that will ensure transparency and stronger long-term relationships. While the province only provides less than eight per cent of a conservation authority’s budget, municipalities make up over 50 per cent, with the remainder coming from self-generated revenue and federal grants. Now, Basit said there is “a template for conservation authorities and municipalities to really understand each other.” 

“Over the years, conservation authorities have grown and prospered, many of them to a point where people sort of took them for granted,” Jorgenson said. “I think this process is going to paint a clearer picture that the programs are important and reported in the right way.”

For some, this exercise will be easier than others. Jorgenson only has to deal with one large municipality, Sudbury, while someone like Basit may have to deal with four or five. Some conservation authorities have to work with dozens of municipalities. “We all speak the same language and we generally do the same thing, but we’re all really different,” Jorgenson said. While some watersheds have massive flooding problems, others face soil erosion or deep deforestation. Jorgenson said these proposed agreements will ensure all conservation authorities are on the same page while giving them the flexibility they need to respond differently to their individual challenges. 

Casgrain-Robertson, of Rideau Valley, said the working group really pushed for regulations that struck a balance between clear objectives and flexibility — and that the province delivered. The onus is now on conservation authorities to make a strong case about what programs are needed and how they’ll deliver them, in order to end up with strong agreements with municipalities.

Ontario Liberal environment critic Lucille Collard said she’s concerned creating these agreements will “take away from [conservation authorities’] ability to do what they are supposed to be mandated for.” 

“I don’t think that conservation authorities’ main strength is negotiation, which is going to be what’s needed in trying to get these agreements with other municipalities,” she said.

Basit said it’s not “a hindrance,” as conservation authorities currently have to present their entire budget to municipal councils every year, with the goal of maintaining or increasing their funding. These multi-year agreements would remove the need to do that. “In a way, it gives us certainty,” he said. 

Seeing how complicated this could be, Piccini agreed to extend the deadline for these agreements from March 2023 to 2024, to factor for elections and drawn-out negotiations. 

“I don’t want to rush decisions,” Piccini told The Narwhal. “We want municipalities to support them, to work with them, to make the most informed decision. So this gave everyone a runway.” 

That runway, however, comes with a lot of uncertainty.

Critics still concerned about funding for Ontario conservation authorities

A lingering problem some see with these agreements is that they don’t guarantee funding in line with what conservation authorities need to face the climate emergency. In theory, municipalities can choose not to sign a funding agreement with a conservation authority. Basit said conservation authorities largely have good relationships with municipalities that just have to be codified on paper, others are less sure.Victor Doyle, a former provincial planner credited as one of the architects of the Greenbelt, is concerned the new regulations don’t seriously acknowledge all the funding that conservation authorities need to provide the three categories of programs and services.

In the 1990s, the Mike Harris government cut provincial funding to conservation authorities from $50 million to $8 million per year divided amongst them. This led to conservation authorities having to reduce their staff between 20 and 60 per cent, according to the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy, and that funding has never been replenished. There has been no major new funding and no adjustment for inflation. Municipalities shoulder most of the costs while also benefiting from the revenue of development those authorities oversee. 

“So there’s no certainty that conservation authorities will be funded to the level needed to operate in a meaningful way,” Doyle said. “These regulations seem to be part of this broader systemic weakening of the conservation authorities, brought about by the influence of the development sector on both the province and municipal politicians.” 

Others skeptics mention the Ford government’s track record on environment issues, which include dismantling or watering down dozens of conservation and clean energy programs. The working group has asked but has not received clarity on the power of the minister to dismiss a conservation authority’s recommendation on development. The minister of natural resources did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for more information on this regulation. Piccini also didn’t provide a clear answer on this, noting only that conservation authorities “play an important role in supporting the local municipalities in their plans for growth.”

“No amount of regulation is going to overcome the fact that conservation authorities’ ability to use science and evidence-based decision-making to protect us from flooding and protect our drinking water has been completely undermined by this government,” Mike Schreiner, leader of the Ontario Greens, said. 

But conservation authority heads say the lesson learned from the last 11 months with the working group is that meaningful engagement and collaboration works. 

“What’s making us feel so much better about the future of conservation authorities is that we now have a partnership with the provincial government, which is what we always wanted,” Casgrain-Robertson said. “Our goal was never to be opposed to any sort of change. We were open to change. We just wanted to be able to work with the government to make sure that changes were done in a way that was responsible, and that would lead to us being able to do our work in a better way.”

“I’m hopeful that the regulations were written in a flexible enough manner that we’ll be able to adopt at a local level in a way that lets us continue to be effective watershed managers,” she said. 

Basit notes the province is seeing greater climate challenges while its population is also increasing and its infrastructure ages. Many of the dams and flood control works that conservation authorities are responsible for were built in the 1950s. Meanwhile, natural hazards are only becoming more frequent and destructive — as seen in B.C. last week and in flooding in Ontario over the past few springs.

“I think it’s more important today than it ever has been in our history that we work closely together with all levels of government,,” Basit said. “I’m really hoping that now that the province has clarified the rules, we can actually start working towards those things.”

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