Ontario’s Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, 2025, became law on June 5 despite considerable controversy. The bill amends such acts as the Environmental Assessment Act, Mining Act, Environmental Protection Act, and Endangered Species Act, 2007. Its main objective is to streamline economic development through reducing bureaucratic barriers. Doing so, however, will come with tradeoffs aimed at weakening environmental protections and consultation with scientific bodies, community members and indigenous populations.
One of the most controversial elements of the new legislation is the replacement of the Endangered Species Act with the less comprehensive Species Conservation Act. Alexander Maclellan, a second-year environmental science and ecology student and co-president of UWs Entomology Club, says, “I think that there has been a lot of really good conservation efforts and I’m really saddened at the idea that those can all be kind of ignored under the idea of economic growth. If conservation efforts are rolled back or ignored and that results in the loss of species here in Ontario, there’s nothing we can do to get that back.” Maclellan describes a similar sentiment shared by other members of the club: “A lot of members plan to go into conservation and related fields so I think it can be really frustrating to see how easily certain practices that we may have taken for granted can be removed. And now replaced with a much weaker set of policies.”
“It’s a terrible step,” says Uday Singh Bains, UW alumni and former president of UW’s Animal Rights Society. “So many species are already at risk, it’s making it easier to exploit the land and animals.”
The Species Conservation Act also redefines the term “habitat,” narrowing it to physical dwellings and the immediate surrounding area. Maclellan feels this modification inaccurately addresses the interconnectedness and complexity of species’ true habitats. “It eliminated habitats used for feeding and migration as part of endangered species habitat or species at risk… For insects especially, that is such a bad idea. It’s really hard to pinpoint where an insect species lives. I think that insects are particularly overlooked in conservation, in that way.”
Geography and environmental management professor Maria Strack, whose research focuses on the importance of wetlands for storing carbon and the rates of greenhouse gas exchange between wetlands and the atmosphere, also expressed concern for lowering the protections for species at risk. “As we start allowing development with less oversight, we do run the risk of not fully considering the impacts of that development not only on the local environment and biodiversity but how that might fragment the broader home ranges of species at risk and could lead to high mortality risks.”
This lack of recognition for the complexity of ecosystems has generated widespread concern regarding a shift away from reliance on local conservation authorities’ understanding of the landscape connectivity. “We could always use more research on sort of landscape scale effects and cumulative effects because often these decisions are being made at a project scale without considering how that adds on to additional projects in the region and how altogether those are going to affect broader functioning,” Strack says.
The Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act also introduces “special economic zones,” designated geographic areas in which the Ontario government could exempt from certain laws and regulations to accelerate development projects.
Harsimran Kaur, current president of the UW Animal Rights Society, believes this undermines the longstanding interests of the province to support sustainable development. “What about the next generation? It’s definitely short-term planning, not long-term planning, which is really sad. There’s no thought of future generations in this case.”
Regarding the proposed special economic zones, Strack addresses the difficulty of quantifying the intrinsic value of our environment against its economic value. “The majority of Ontarians will never get to go and see these areas of our own province, and yes, maybe it’s easy for us to understand the potential economic benefits of developing those critical minerals, but we also have a treasure. We have a treasure in this wetland which most of us will never get to see. It can be very easy to trade what you can understand for what you don’t get to see.”
Highlighting the risk associated with waiving legal and regulatory processes to speed up development projects, Strack argues the importance of extensive knowledge on ecosystem functioning and the potential implications of certain developments and what’s at stake. “Because of the long time frames of the development of these ecosystems, their interconnected nature and the fact that it really is a treasure, one of the largest peatland complexes in the world, and really intact, I think we should just really think about what we value.”
Through accelerated development and reduced environmental protections, the Act could pose potential consequences for Ontario’s climate resilience. In particular, wetlands play a key role in the province’s long-term goal of achieving below 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, storing approximately 29 billion tonnes of carbon. That’s the equivalent of taking every one of Canada’s 24.1 million gas-powered vehicles off the road for 1,000 years. Wary of the implications of the Act for Ontario’s wetlands, Strack added that across the globe, peatlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s forests and disturbing them could contribute to additional climate warming.
Beyond their role as carbon sinks, Ontario’s wetlands provide a vast range of ecosystem services such as reducing flooding and supporting wildlife, Maclellan added. “I think something like 20 per cent of species on the Endangered Species Act require wetlands. And that’s huge. So, that’s insects, that’s many other species, waterfowl, reptiles, amphibians.” But, like Strack, Alexander notes the difficulty in generating advocacy for the protection of such areas. “I think people just generally don’t like wetlands, they’re not very economically valuable.”
Bill 5 has also raised concerns for its neglect of inherent treaty rights and community obligations to First Nations peoples. Strack regrettably acknowledges the lack of priority for consultation with Indigenous communities that have the right to be consulted on these land use changes. “I don’t think Indigenous communities and governments are necessarily pro or against development but they all want to have their rights maintained, particularly that duty to consult. So there are large concerns that particularly the designation of these special economic zones where development decisions could be made without some of that oversight would also have large implications for the provinces reconciliation goals and just maintenance of charter rights of those indigenous communities.”
Many supporters of the Act argue it is necessary to strengthen Ontario’s economic resilience despite the potential environmental harms. Supporters often point to the province’s housing crisis as a reason for the Act. Maclellan counters this argument, however, stating that “in the guise of solving the housing crisis I don’t think it’s good to destroy the environment, because obviously we can still build housing but if we rush through and destroy the environment, there’s no way to get that back.”
Strack holds a similar opinion. “I think those comments sometimes come from the thinking that environmental regulations and protections are there just as red tape to slow down development, but they are there to protect the environment which is also linked to our health and wellbeing.” Such support for our wellbeing, she says, could include “water quality, access to green spaces, and prevention of flooding,” among many others. “In my opinion, streamlining development at the expense of those other important services that the ecosystems are providing is not going to pay off in the end.”
