In the late 1930s, Ontario field naturalist clubs began calling for a halt to the slope erosion and deforestation that was ravaging the Oak Ridges Moraine and other sandy areas in southern Ontario. In response, in 1943 the provincial government established a conservation branch within the Ministry of Natural Resources and enacted the Conservation Authorities Act in 1946. The act, which was among the first of its kind in North America, was expanded a decade later to establish floodplain protection in the wake of Hurricane Hazel. By the late 1970s, there were dozens of conservation authorities (CAs) across Ontario. Almost all were, and still are, run by local boards with links to municipalities.
The boards are supported by provincial staff and federal agencies who both provide the expertise needed to protect environmentally sensitive lands. By most accounts, this conservation philosophy was groundbreaking in its time. The CAs had a mandate to weigh in on a multitude of issues, including how infrastructure was maintained, the restoration of wetlands, and the land use decisions around floodplains. They also provided recreational programming and environmental education.
In November 2025, the Ford government took a second run at constraining the CAs, aiming to merge 36 into seven regional authorities. Two of the seven—the Huron-Superior Regional Conservation Authority and the Eastern Lake Ontario Regional Conservation Authority— encompass cottage areas, including parts of Georgian Bay, the southern portion of the Bruce Peninsula, the Kawartha Lakes, and Lake Simcoe. (CAs have not traditionally operated in the lake districts further north, such as Muskoka and Haliburton, as their land uses, water quality, and watershed management are regulated by provincial and federal agencies.)
Ostensibly, this proposed reform is in the name of administrative efficiency and establishing a province-wide conservation authority agency with its own board and staff. The proposed changes were buried in the Tories’ 2026 omnibus budget bill and circulated for a 45-day public consultation in late fall. The government has pledged that the new boundaries will map onto existing watersheds. Some critics see this as another attempt by the government to limit the ability of CAs to constrain ecologically damaging development.
Dan Shrubsole, a geographer at Western University in London, Ont., who wrote his PhD about the CA program, describes the move as a “step change” following a set of 2021 reforms aimed at limiting the types of activities and programs CAs undertook. “I’m a bit confused about what has brought about this proposal,” he says. The government’s reasons include unpredictable turnaround times on reviews of development applications, fragmented fee structures, and uncertainty for builders with projects that fall within a CA’s jurisdiction. “I don’t see any evidence that that’s the truth,” says Shrubsole.
The CAs within the Lake Erie basin, for example, “are meeting the target turnaround time 90 per cent of the time.” Other CA watchers are stumped too, although they have their theories—among them, pressure from builders to get the CAs to divest their land holdings. During previous efforts to limit their powers, Queen’s Park “leaned on” the CAs to sell off surplus lands to developers, particularly for housing, says Tim Gray, the executive director of Environmental Defence, a Canadian advocacy group. “But land shortage is not the reason we’re not building houses in this province.”
For some conservation advocates, the main concern is how the proposed consolidation will impact conservation activity, wetland protection, and flood mitigation. Watershed-based planning—i.e. land uses and development along rivers and streams—has long been the heart of provincial policy. “Reducing the number of conservation authorities will really start to move us away from having localized context for development, which is what we have right now,” says Theresa McClenaghan, the executive director and counsel for the Canadian Environmental Law Association.
To function effectively, CAs must work closely with local municipalities and land-use stakeholders, such as farmers and developers. “I’m really concerned about the governance that would apply in a set of seven conservation authorities. They would move from having several municipalities in each case, to, in many cases, hundreds of municipalities within their boundaries.” (Municipal fees pay for the lion’s share of CA budgets, with the balance coming from programming fees, donations, and federal grants.) By consolidating the CAs into seven regional entities that answer to a centralized provincial agency and to the Minister of the Environment, the government seems to be designing a structure that mollifies developers.
“There’s no need for it,” says Gray. “They want a rubber stamp for any new development. They don’t want to deal with things like, what is the overall threshold of a watershed to sustain inputs before it starts to pose a risk to property or life?” Besides the accelerating deregulation, McCleneghan predicts that supersized CAs will lose community engagement via reduced volunteerism, for example. “If people see decisions they haven’t been a part of, and especially if they see natural heritage values they’ve been protecting for decades changed because of directions imposed by the agency or the province, it will impact land donations via conservation easements to the CAs,” she says. Such donations, which also go to non-profits, such as the Nature Conservancy or the Bruce Trail Conservancy, protect sensitive property from redevelopment. “People won’t trust making donations of land.”
Despite the province’s drive for administrative consistency, each CA has a unique set of land forms and water resources that need policies and programs that are responsive to those conditions, says Shrubsole. He cites, by way of example, the geographical contrast between the southwestern corner of Ontario, which is very flat and agricultural, and the watersheds and moraines around the Waterloo area, which have been experiencing some groundwater shortage.
The large footprints of the seven new regional conservation authorities, he predicts, will make it much more difficult for the dozens of local municipalities and the many communities they encompass to align behind conservation strategies designed to both protect sensitive areas and promote sustainable development. “If you end up losing conservation land, it’s going to be a real negative from a human recreation and a quality-of-life perspective,” says Gray. The ecological fallout, however, could be even more dire: “If they muck around with the permitting regime and start forcing CAs to issue permits without proper analysis of watershed level impacts, you’re going to see worse flooding.”
Increased flooding is just one symptom of practices such as over-paving and wetland destruction. Ontario, where conservation policy took root in response to widespread environmental degradation, seems to be unspooling eight decades of progressive planning.
John Lorinc has also written for The Globe and Mail, Corporate Knights, and Spacing.
This story originally appeared in our Early Spring ’26 issue.
Editor’s Note: Since this story was published, the government has updated their plan to reduce the conservation authorities to nine instead of seven.
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