Good morning,
The Ford government got what must have been unwelcome news this week: the federal government, after years of dithering, announced formal protections for the redside dace.
Why would Ontario’s government care that a little minnow got protection? Well, for one thing, it happens to live right in the path of their current pet project, a highway designed to enable GTA to sprawl ever farther into Southern Ontario’s hinterlands.
The government now has a high bar to overcome in pushing for its promised Highway 413. Under to the federal Species At Risk Act (SARA), “any activity affecting Redside Dace’s critical habitat must comply with SARA and the Fisheries Act to ensure it does not jeopardize the species' survival or recovery,” a Fisheries and Oceans spokesperson told CNO’s Natasha Bulowski this week.
It’s hard to imagine how a highway through its habitat wouldn’t jeopardize the recovery of a species that has declined 50 per cent over the past decade, according to Ontario’s own assessment of its health. It’s not the only species living along the highway’s route: 11 species at risk would be affected.
The federal government has had trouble stepping in to put the environment above development, however. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the government over the constitutional overreach of the Impact Assessment Act late last year — finding that while that law “plainly overstepped the mark,” it still did have the authority to mitigate risks to the environment within the bounds of the constitutional division of powers. That, Stephen Guilbeault has said, is making him reluctant to meddle in Highway 413 on the basis of an environmental assessment. Instead, the two levels of government have been working together on a joint assessment.
But with the redside dace officially protected, now the question is whether protecting species at risk is one of those cases where the feds have the power to step in. Ontario has its own species-at-risk legislation, which prohibits development that would damage habitat the fish have been shown to live within the past decade (down from two decades after a recent weakening of the law).
Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence, told Bulowski the Species At Risk Act protection will mean the highway’s federal-permit-dependent future has been thrown into question. “It's really hard to see how those permits could be issued with the current configuration of the highway,” he said.
Redside dace has direct benefits to human life that we already knew about: the tiny fish leap out of the water to snatch bugs like mosquitoes out of the air. As a unique living creature and a member of an unfathomably complex ecosystem, of course, it also has inherent value that can’t be quantified, measured or traded off.
But preventing an increase in the urban sprawl that’s blighting Southern Ontario? That’s a superpower.
—Jimmy, managing editor
TOP STORY
A look at photos of the world-famous Sudbury Holiday Inn shows a square concrete block – with windows – featuring a kidney-shaped pool that could accommodate dozens of swimmers if nobody tried to swim. David Moscrop writes.
Number of the week
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