At some point in 2023, Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources pushed through updates to its map of provincially protected wetlands, and 55 hectares in Ottawa’s rural west end were dropped.
Two sizeable wetlands — one on either side of Highway 7 — used to be classified as part of the Goulbourn complex, a group of marshes and swamps that stretch across an area west of the suburb of Stittsville.
Now they are among the first known examples of wetlands to lose their “provincially significant” status since the Ontario government rolled out controversial changes in January 2023 aimed at getting homes built faster.
That means they no longer meet the bar for the top-level provincial protection given to Ontario’s most valuable marshes, swamps, fens and bogs. Owners aren’t allowed to disrupt or develop those wetlands.
Other lines on maps might be shifting, too, but it’s not an easy job to track and verify because the Ministry of Natural Resources has a diminished role now: It doesn’t even have final say on wetland evaluations anymore.
The group Ontario Nature is one of the few that’s working through data sets and looking for clues one by one.
From what the group has calculated, close to 600 hectares might have been delisted in three dozen other municipalities across Ontario, according to Tony Morris, the group’s director of conservation policy and campaigns.
55 hectares
The hectares in Ottawa only came to public attention in early September, about a year after they’d lost status, because the City of Ottawa did some housekeeping so its zoning would reflect the ministry’s mapping.
One downgraded 10-hectare wetland was on land where a quarry expansion is planned. The other is 41 hectares, near the cloverleaf for highways 417 and 7.
In that case, a private owner cleared land and drew the attention of the conservation authority. The resulting study led to that wetland losing status on the owner’s property — and his neighbours’ too. The rest of the 55 hectares were smaller tweaks.
Janet Stavinga first noticed missing patches of Goulbourn wetland when she checked the online map one day. She could tell something was missing — the former pre-amalgamation mayor and Ottawa city councillor has followed the wetland’s contours for three decades.
There were wins and losses over the years, she explains as she stands on an old rail bed that’s now a section of the Trans Canada Trail crossing a scenic swamp.
As urban areas pressed in, some municipal land swaps managed to protect wetlands, she remembers. Other times, the municipality lost decisions at a land tribunal and former wetlands were developed for housing.
Indeed, wetland designations have often been contentious.
Wetlands change over time, and some question if mapping always gets it right. After all, a wetland designation can prevent an owner from touching that part of their property, which lowers its value.
But now, Stavinga says the Ontario government is rolling back decades of environmental protection in the name of building more housing.
“Rather than the provincial government stepping up to protect our wetlands, they stepped away,” Stavinga said.
Some recent policies drove Stittsville residents to community meetings, and they encouraged her to form the Friends of Stittsville Wetlands, a group that’s trying to make headway with private owners of wetlands.
Wetland ‘superheroes’
Stavinga has been drilling down into a 247-page manual called the Ontario Wetland Evaluation System, or OWES, and says changes to the fourth edition in 2022 have left wetlands less protected.
She’s by no means the first to suggest this. The majority of the 14,848 people and groups who submitted comments during public consultations in November 2022 raised concerns that the rewrite would do exactly that.
The manual has been around since 1983. It instructs evaluators how to score a wetland and where to draw the line around its edges.
Rebecca Rooney, a biology professor and founder of the wetland lab at the University of Waterloo, says the scorecard balances the need for land with protecting the best wetlands.
She says wetlands do many jobs: They act as a sponge to soak up water in floods and release it in droughts; they purify water, which helps the quality of drinking water; they act as carbon sinks; and they’re home to a quarter of Ontario’s species at risk.
Not all wetlands do all of these things, says Rooney, but the “superheroes” — labelled provincially significant — are too valuable to lose.
In November 2022, however, the Ontario government proposed an updated manual, with page after page of text struck through.
That same month, the government made other moves to speed home construction, swapping land in the Greenbelt and expanding Ottawa’s and Hamilton’s urban boundaries. Both of those decisions were later rescinded.
The wetland changes took effect in January 2023. The government explains them now the way it did then.
“What was removed were duplicative requirements and more clarity added on how significant wetlands are evaluated and identified to conservation authorities, municipalities, and communities to streamline the evaluation process,” wrote Melissa Candelaria, press secretary to Natural Resources Minister Graydon Smith.
No review by MNR
One significant change to the scoring system was that a wetland could not rack up quite as many points for housing species at risk.
Nor could it get the same points for being large. A wetland now gets scored on its own, not as part of a bigger complex with the wetlands nearby.
Homebuilders wrote in 2022 that tiny wetlands were getting labelled significant when they didn’t have much value, but conservationists said even outlying patches of wetland matter and are interconnected.
Moreover, the new manual gives the final word on a wetland’s status to the evaluator hired to do the report. The Ministry of Natural Resources no longer reviews their work.
It’s completely ludicrous to exclude the competency of the Ministry of Natural Resources. They have a skill set to evaluate the wetlands.– Janet Stavinga, Friends of Stittsville Wetlands
At the time the government said this was to “better recognize the professional opinion of wetland evaluators.” They take an intensive week-long course at the University of Nipissing, and spend the week tramping around wetlands around North Bay, Ont., analyzing species and soils before doing an exam to become certified.
The wetland evaluator is required to send a copy of their report to the municipality, but that city doesn’t get to weigh in. The MNR, meanwhile, receives only a shape file so it can update its map.
But Stavinga says without any review, errors can be missed.
“It’s completely ludicrous to exclude the competency of the Ministry of Natural Resources. They have a skill set to evaluate the wetlands.”
Rooney also notes there will always be subjectivity in evaluations. One evaluator might not recognize signs of a species, or a wetland might be drier one year than the next.
“There are lots of really rigorous and ethical consulting companies that do really good work,” said Rooney, who has seen many of her students go on to work in consulting. “But there are some that are less so, so you can find someone to put the line where you want the line.”
Local protections
Ontario Nature now finds itself manually comparing data sets to see where provincial protections have been lost, and trying to enlist local groups to dig into details. They’ve found trends near Lake Simcoe and Fort Erie, for instance, but each case needs to be looked into individually.
Wetlands without provincial designations can still be given a local-level protection under municipal official plans. The City of Ottawa has assigned the 55 hectares the new label “natural heritage feature”.
Conservation authorities, meanwhile, still regulate wetlands and the 30 metres that surround them, although that buffer area was 120 metres before a separate change April 1.
Morris says development won’t necessarily happen just because a wetland loses designation. But he worries what will happen in small municipalities that have a single planner or no biology expertise on staff.
“There really isn’t a consistent approach across the province,” he said. “Wetlands are too valuable for that kind of piecemeal approach.”
CBC News asked Smith whether the government might boost transparency, or what he might say to those who suggest the scorecard changes are developer-friendly.
Those questions weren’t answered. Instead, Smith’s office pointed to the $30 million in grants Ontario is handing out to conservation groups to create new wetlands and restore others.
“Our government will continue to protect our wetlands and that is why we have made one of the largest investments in wetland restoration in Ontario’s history,” it said in a statement.