Pay To Slay

That's what critics are calling Bill 108, the “More Homes, More Choice Act,” introduced stealthily, as the cowardly are wont to do, by the Ford regime in Ontario. Buried in an omnibus bill, the favoured vehicle of the dishonest, (including both Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper), the bill promises to open up to developers sensitive aeas that will greatly endanger Ontario's at-risk animals and plants.

On the day a UN study reports that more than a million species worldwide are at risk of extinction, we should all be standing up taking distressed notice.

Bill 108, the “More Homes, More Choice Act,” would weaken classification criteria, allow the environment minister to delay protections for up to three years, and provide developers, industry and others who impact the habitat of endangered species with a suite of options to continue their activities, including a fee-in-lieu fund derided by critics as “pay to slay.”

Of course, the Ford regime, led by a man who has never met a developer he didn't like, is cloaking it as a means of addressing housing shortages. Hence the bill's simplistic title: the “More Homes, More Choice Act.” It is a subterfuge his willing, amoral acolytes and MPPs are happy to propagate, insisting the bill will actually enhance protections:

Lindsay Davidson, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, said Ontario is committed to ensuring “best-in-class” protections for endangered and threatened species.

“The proposed changes … will enhance government oversight and enforcement powers to ensure compliance with the act and improve transparent notification of new species’ listings,” Davidson said in an email.

Cold reality is perhaps best expressed by experts in the field of biodiversity:

“It really is very deferential to exactly those threats that are affecting species at risk today,” said Justina Ray, president and senior scientist of Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. “I’m very concerned that at the end of the day, we kind of have an empty shell of an act.”

Or, to put it more bluntly,

“It really is a doomsday scenario for endangered species in this province,” said Kelsey Scarfone, program manager at Environmental Defence Canada.

“It’s basically been whittled down to nothing. They might as well have just cancelled it,” she said.

Every day brings forth more bad news. It is the fate of the newspaper reader to absorb this news, and to be as well-informed as possible about the depredations that envelop us. But it doesn't end there. Until each of us realizes that the well-being of nature (and I do urge you, in the strongest terms possible, to read about the UN report) and our very survival are inextricably linked, the destruction and rapidly increasing extinctions will only continue.

Bad, greedy people know no bounds.