(This post is adapted from an update that was originally published on my Substack newsletter.)
Late last fall, the provincial government announced plans to consolidate Ontario’s 36 conservation authorities (CAs) down to seven.
For the Ottawa area, the province proposed merging the three CAs in our region1 with two others, creating a massive eastern regional authority spanning two major rivers (the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence).
Many municipalities across Ontario passed motions raising major concerns — and sometimes outright opposition to — the proposal. Ottawa City Council, among other resolutions, called on the province “to maintain local, municipally-governed, watershed-based Conservation Authorities to ensure effective natural resource and hazard management, transparent local services, bilingualism obligations, and accountability over municipal levy dollars…”
(The Conservation Authorities are each governed by a board of directors made up of councillors who represent the municipalities covered by the watershed. For example, I’m one of four Ottawa Council representatives on the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority board, which covers an area from the Carp River in Kanata–Stittsville to Upper Mazinaw Lake near Bon Echo Park.)
A group of 74 watershed professionals wrote a letter to the Premier and several Ministers urging “care and caution” and stating that “the proposed restructuring appears to lack an evidence-based approach and business case”. The letter includes 16 recommendations on how the province could proceed.
Those experts are right to be concerned. Messing around with the governance and staff at conservation authorities comes with a high level of risk and should not be taken lightly.
- CAs play an important role in managing and preventing floods. That’s top of mind for me right now as we enter the spring freshet season.
- CAs play a key role in monitoring and maintaining clean drinking water, by protecting and improving the quality of water sources.
- Collectively, Ontario’s CAs own and manage over 150,000 hectares of natural areas used for conservation, recreation, flood and erosion control.
***
On Tuesday, the provincial government announced revised plans to consolidate the 36 CAs down to nine (instead of seven), along with other changes to what was originally proposed in the fall. They’re targeting February 2027 to complete the mergers. A few other things that stood out to me in the update yesterday:
- The governance still isn’t clear to me. The province says the CAs will remain independent organizations – presumably this means independent from the province, even though they sit under a new Ontario Provincial Conser vation Agency. It’s not clear how this governance would function. And provincial officials emphasized that the new CAs will maintain municipal governance. But only cities and counties will have representation on the management boards. Lower tier municipalities (towns and townships) will be cut out. And a single board will now be managing an organization responsible for a much larger geography.
- CAs will still continue to manage land that they own, including conservation areas.
- The CAs will establish new “watershed councils” to “help identify local priorities for watershed-based conservation programs and services”.
- I’m not a fan of the name they’ve assigned to the Ottawa region CA – “St. Lawrence River Regional CA”. It’s a bit of a misnomer, given that most of the watershed rivers flow to the Ottawa River: Mississippi, Carp, Rideau, and South Nation. Only the Raisin River flows directly into the St. Lawrence. (Although I suppose the Ottawa eventually drains into the St. Lawrence?)
More info:
- Media Backgrounder: Improving Ontario’s Conservation Authority System (PDF)
- Ontario Nature advocacy on conservation authorities
Existing Conservation Authorities in Ontario
