Political pandemic plans plummet

With the public distracted by a pandemic, it may have seemed a politically smart time for the Doug Ford’s Conservative Party to dramatically overhaul Conservation Authorities with new rules buried in a budget bill, but evidence suggests that calculation was dead wrong. Bill 229 was met with a public outpouring that included 45,000 emails to government officials and formal opposition from all of the province’s Conservation Authorities as well as nearly forty municipal councils, including Hamilton, Burlington and St Catharines.

The province responded just before Christmas by appointing an advisory working group on regulations for the legislation that a provincial spokesman said will “ensure that conservation authorities and other stakeholders have a stronger voice at the table when it comes to government decision-making.” But that also appears not to be working out for the Ford government.

Particular local outrage has come from conservative councillors like Tom Jackson, who has run unsuccessfully for the federal Tories. Last week he accused the Ford government of “want[ing] more authority to intervene on development applications.”

Similarly Glanbrook councillor Brenda Johnson emphasized “how many developers and people from the home building industry got a place at the [advisory group] table” in contrast to the zero representatives from the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority that she chairs.

Ancaster councillor Lloyd Ferguson called the changes “unconscionable” and said “the province walloped us with a baseball bat.” He was particularly bitter that Queen’s Park “made all these wholesale changes” despite providing only two percent of the funding for the Hamilton Conservation Authority (HCA) that he heads.

And far from distracting the public, the pandemic appears to have had the opposite effect. It has led huge numbers of residents to head outdoors to the public trails, wetlands and waterfalls protected by Conservation Authorities. With many more residents now aware of what they have to offer to the public, these stewards of natural areas are enjoying unprecedented popularity.

In 2020 the HCA saw a full fifty percent increase in sales of vehicle passes. And for the first time it had to turn away visitors from overfull trails and campgrounds, the HCA’s executive director Lisa Burnside told city councillors last week.

She explained that initial fears that pandemic-forced shutdowns would create a severe financial crisis instead turned into new revenues that resulted in a lower than usual need for city funding support. Use of HCA campgrounds last summer was up by 44 percent, reported Burnside.

The huge public demand for walking, hiking and nature viewing forced the imposition of a two-hour limit on use of trails near Webster’s Falls. That was met with 8000 reservations in just eight weeks and the Authority now expects to continue using the system for at least the first six months of 2021.

This reservation-only area is a tiny portion of the over 120 kilometres of recreational trails provided by the HCA which have also been heavily used especially in the Dundas Valley. In addition they manage most of the popular rail trails from Hamilton to Brantford and south toward Caledonia on the Chippewa Trail.

These public facilities are the result of the Authority owning and protecting more than eleven thousands acres of land in the portion of Hamilton where it manages watersheds. Ironically it is precisely these kinds of services being targetted by the Ford government as outside what it believes is the “core mandate” of Conservation Authorities.

The three other Conservation Authorities with jurisdiction inside Hamilton’s boundaries are also reporting big jumps in usage. The NPCA pointed to an “unprecedented” number of visitors, with over 3000 every summer weekend in the Binbrook Conservation Area. As chair Johnson noted: “Green spaces have never been more important as we grapple with the global pandemic.”