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The Ford government is routinely making decisions before environmental consultations have concluded and under-resourcing public education about those consultations, the auditor general has found in her annual report.
Under Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights, the government is required to give public notice of decisions which could impact the environment, listen to feedback and, in some cases, trigger investigations.
Over several years, the auditor general has charted an apparent disregard for those rules from the Progressive Conservatives, exempting some laws from them entirely and passing others before consultations had been completed.
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The pattern, Auditor General Shelley Spence concluded, is reducing the public’s ability to shape legislation which affects them.
“We conclude that, together, the Province’s actions, inaction and decisions in recent years are eroding Ontarians’ EBR rights and opportunities to participate meaningfully in the government’s environmental decision-making,” she wrote in her annual report, published Tuesday.
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Since 2019, Spence found the Progressive Conservatives have passed laws that impact the environment without any consultation and passed others while those consultations were still underway. Some projects have been exempted altogether, and courts have twice found them to have contravened environmental rights.
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“The Province has been taking actions that had rarely or never been taken since the EBR was enacted in 1994,” Spence wrote.
The auditor general made 12 recommendations to the government to improve its compliance, only nine of which have been accepted.
The Ford government rejected recommendations to carry out a public consultation on committing to Health Canada’s reduced guideline for lead in drinking water, rejected the suggestion that all consultations should explain the environmental impact of a proposal and said it would not refrain from exempting some projects from those consultations.
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