Conservation authorities contemplate future after Ontario announces plan to consolidate 36 agencies

Conservation authorities in Ontario are contemplating their next move after Environment Minister Todd McCarthy announced the provincial government will soon introduce legislation to consolidate the 36 agencies into seven.

On Friday, McCarthy said the proposed legislation would facilitate the establishment of a new provincial agency to oversee the amalgamated conservation authorities and consult on the proposed boundaries of the new regional authorities.

Conservation authorities undertake a broad range of programs, including:

More than 100 municipalities are within two or more conservation authorities' boundaries and therefore subject to different rules and processes, McCarthy said, adding that an amalgamation would result in improved services. Additionally, he said, there would be no job losses.

"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," McCarthy said.

Michael Drescher, associate professor in the University of Waterloo's School of Planning, said conservation authorities have had to deal with a lack of funding for some time.

He told CBC K-W’s The Morning Edition that more than 50 per cent of the funding for conservation authorities comes from the municipalities they serve.

According to Drescher, in  2019 when the provincial government cut funding to conservation authorities by 50 per cent, “they were warned back then that that would lead to reductions in service levels, so this is a self-inflicted injury.”

Drescher said while he does not yet have a sense of how conservation authorities would address the latest proposed changes, he knows they “have suffered in their service provision capacity because of the funding cuts.” 

“They had to ... repeatedly over the last years change their processes. They are, of course, trying the very best to serve our communities and they are great at doing that,” Drescher said. 

“My concern is when we are now [reducing] conservation authorities, as was suggested from 36 that we're having now to seven potentially in the future, and then building another agency on top of that … that sounds to me like actually more bureaucracy and not cutting red tape.”

CBC News reached out to several conservation authorities to get their reaction to McCarthy’s announcement. Clicking on each link will take you to the conservation authority you're interested in reading about:

ERCA is one of three conservation authorities in Windsor-Essex.

ERCA’s chief administrative officer, Tim Byrne, said what conservation authorities need at this time is provincial support to do their work, “not wholesale changes or deconstruction of a process that actually does work.”