I hate click-bait headlines about crises. Maybe especially when they’re true. I’m crisis-ed out. But here we are.
It has been a privilege to sit on the board of directors for Lower Trent Conservation Authority this term of council. When councillors were being delegated to various committees and boards, this was one that I was most eager to participate in: Conservation Authorities play a key role in maintaining local environmental knowledge and determining where it is safe and wise to develop (and where it is not), and my green heart leaped at the chance to support their good work. I hoped I would have a chance to grow into a leadership role there, even. I did not imagine that I would be Lower Trent’s last ever vice chair.
Come February 1st, the Board of Directors of every Conservation Authority in Ontario (which is to say, every Conservation Authority in the world) will be dismissed. Local representatives delegated from lower-tier municipalities like ours and charged with protection of the watershed and the residents who depend on it will be sent home, with our entire board replaced by a single representative for all of Northumberland County as part of the Ford government’s plan to “consolidate” CAs into something new. In this post I’ll start with a brief review of where CAs came from, what they do, and why they’re important (though that should be obvious from the description of what they do), and then I’ll describe what’s been happening to them over the past several months, and what we can expect in the months to come.
What Are Conservation Authorities?
Political boundaries are completely made up. We determine municipal and electoral district boundaries where it seems appropriate based on things like population distribution and convenience and sometimes simply arbitrary choices. In Brighton, many residents identify more closely with Trenton (10 minutes to the east) than with Northumberland (which stretches from Brighton in the east to Trent Hills in the north and Port Hope in the west), or with the Bay of Quinte region (which includes Prince Edward County and Belleville and Tyendenaga too). There are places in Brighton that you can only get to by driving through parts of Quinte West, in the place where QW extends onto the landmass that is otherwise called Prince Edward County. Our political boundaries are just that, political, conceptual. Except Conservation Authorities.
Going back about a hundred years, residents of Ontario started forming Conservation Authorities, or their predecessors, as watershed-based organizations whose goal was to preserve environments and their resources and inform local policy that affected the watershed. Watersheds are a natural region of sorts: it is the area of land in which all of the water flows toward the same point, usually a river or lake. While we often divide it into “sub-watersheds”, because setting a conceptual boundary on any system can involve some recognition that there are systems-within-systems (which is to say, some rivers flow into other rivers), a watershed is the closest thing we have to a clear boundary in nature aside from the shore itself. Watersheds right next to each other can have different ecosystems, with different conditions and different species who have adapted to those conditions. And something that happens in one corner of a watershed can affect all downstream areas, because the water all ends up flowing together.
While the earliest CAs were local volunteer organizations without any government sanction, in 1946 the Conservation Authorities Act formalized them, giving them the legislated right to petition local governments to establish Conservation Authorities. After Hurricane Hazel hit Toronto in 1954, killing dozens of people there, CAs were mandated with the regulatory power to ensure that nobody built houses in floodplains or other places where watercourses made development unsafe or unstable.
Over the years the official mandate of CAs has changed repeatedly as provincial governments either increased or decreased development regulation. At times they had a much broader environmental protection role, which was fitting given their close knowledge of the local watershed and ecosystem, and the fact that many of the original CAs were started for the purpose of environmental protection in the first place. But the current government believes that CAs are here to ensure that people–and perhaps especially property–doesn’t get washed away, period. Anything that falls outside of that narrow vision, including providing active recreation areas that generate income for a CA, draws the ire of provincial politicians and gets used to justify defunding CAs. (Proctor Park and Goodrich-Loomis are free for anyone to enter as a matter of principle.)
So our provincially mandated operations at Lower Trent are fairly narrow, including planning and building permits. Can someone build a thing there? CA staff determine if it’s too close to a waterway, doing site visits to verify their data on the local watershed and then apply their knowledge of provincial law and policy along with municipal planning processes to determine exactly where and how the thing in question should be built. Very often, no permit is required: there’s no watercourse there, so the building only needs to meet municipal zoning requirements and get a building permit from the municipality. Sometimes Lower Trent issues a permit, with fairly straightforward conditions: the building must be at least ___m from this watercourse. Other times the case is quite complex: a property under development in Brighton was issued a permit that considered tens of thousands of cubic metres of fill being applied to several square kilometers of land, the removal of a 1980’s era berm that redirected the flow of Butler Creek, and computer mapping of water flows showing that this development activity would actually improve downstream flood risks for residents along Cedar Street. Some files take minutes to close; some take years. Residents who want to appeal the decision of staff can come before the Board of Directors to plead their case, and the results of that hearing can be appealed at the Ontario Land Tribunal.
Lower Trent staff also have an enforcement role: if someone is impacting a waterway, the CA has the authority to issue fines and other orders to attempt to stop the disruption or contamination of that waterway. Most of us live downstream from someone, and wouldn’t appreciate it if their activity on their property causes our property to flood or become contaminated. Our staff sometimes end up going to court to settle such matters.
Lower Trent also operates a Source Water Protection program. Using the science of hydrogeology (how water flows through the land), we know that a pollutant spilled in a certain area will impact the ground water within a given region, and so there are standards for ground pollution that reflect that science. In particular, we have higher standards for pollutants in areas where ground water might flow into municipal drinking water sources. This often affects agricultural operations, where farmers might be spreading manure or using chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could potentially flow into municipal wellheads. CAs like Lower Trent keep our drinking water safe, before it even gets to the municipal water operation.
All of these functions, and more, are essential to the life we enjoy in Ontario. And they’re all invisible to most people.
Shrinking CAs
Over the Ford years we’ve seen a steady de-funding of Conservation Authorities. When the province mandates someone to do something, but then stops paying for it, we call that “downloading costs to municipalities”–because it’s municipalities who need to make up the difference. While there has always been cost sharing between the province and municipalities for CAs, a few years back the province cut their funding in half in a single year. They also froze our ability to raise permit fees, removing the other primary way that CAs can pay our staff. As I mentioned above, some CAs have profitable recreation areas; but when I have complained to MPPs about being defunded, I’ve had them come back with complaints about a golf course run by a CA in Toronto. One CA having too much money was apparently the rationale for defunding all of us.
Lower Trent Conservation Authority’s board includes representatives from seven municipalities: Alnwick/Haldimand, Cramahe, Trent Hills, Brighton, Quinte West, Stirling-Rawdon, and Centre Hastings. Portions of each of those municipalities are part of the watershed of the Trent River. ALL of Brighton is in the Lower Trent watershed, so we only have one CA for our municipality; but Trent Hills has portions of their municipality in three different watersheds, and Centre Hastings has only a tiny bit of land in the Lower Trent watershed. So our seven municipalities share the bill for Lower Trent’s budget according to apportionment, which is to say an equation that considers the population and value of real estate from the portion of that municipality that falls within the watershed. Centre Hastings pays a few thousand dollars annually, while Quinte West (by far the largest municipality in the watershed) pays several hundreds of thousands. Voting is similarly apportioned: some municipalities send two councillors to the board, some send one, and some members have more voting power than others. On a weighted vote, councillors from Quite West need only one other person to vote with them to carry the vote.
So every year that I’ve been on the board, we’ve followed the same process of striking a budget committee (that I’ve sat on twice now) that determines how much we’re willing to spend as an organization, knowing that the budget will need to be approved by the Board of Directors but will also need to be adopted by every member municipality. I can attest that there is no fat to trim: we needed to decide whether or not to get new gravel for the parking lot of a conservation area, or whether or not to fix a leaky roof, both basic maintenance issues that cost a few hundred dollars. That’s how tight the budget is. It is a struggle to get the board to agree to have competitive salaries for staff, or to recognize their service. We put off important scientific studies that aren’t strictly mandated. We finally approved technical upgrades and cloud services, after years of barely having stable internet connections. Our staff know they could make more money doing similar things elsewhere, but they mostly stay because they believe in the mission of the Conservation Authority. Even so, it’s difficult for us to hire anyone, and we still lose staff to better opportunities elsewhere. As an organization, we’re malnourished: we’re literally starving for funding, while the province forces municipalities to fund us and municipalities aren’t willing to do so at healthy levels. And yet I’m very proud of the work our staff have done to maintain service levels and meet provincial timelines for issuing permits: Lower Trent has a score of 99%, as good as anyone anywhere could hope for, while on a shoestring budget. We were making it work.
Consolidating CAs
Then, without warning, the Ford government tabled legislation that included creating a new oversight body to control CAs. They’ve always been watershed-based and independent (though we all share a stake in Conservation Ontario, an umbrella group to help us work well with each other and the province). Now there’s a new Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency (not a Ministry, another new body altogether) that controls CAs, and is working to “consolidate” or merge them.
Currently there are 36 Conservation Authorities, each based on a watershed or sub-watershed. As I said earlier, I think it’s important to acknowledge what is perhaps the only political boundary that is actually rooted in the land rather than purely conceptual. Now those CAs are being merged into 9 (originally pitched as 7). The Lower Trent watershed will now be part of the Eastern Lake Ontario Regional Conservation Authority, composed of what used to be 7 CAs. Lower Trent’s board currently represents 7 municipalities; the new Regional CA will represent over 50 municipalities.
At the time this legislation was passed, all we knew about it was that it would create the new agency and consolidate the CAs. There were few other details to be had. I attended an informational webinar, twice, trying to understand it. Then I drove to Vaughan for a visioning session, which included the Minister and the new head of the new agency along with CA staff and municipal staff and elected representatives from all over, where they asked us to envision ways for us to make CAs better, more efficient and effective. It would have been a great session, if it had happened before they had already passed the bill that seemingly set the path forward in stone. The session generated all sorts of ways that CAs could work together better, could become more efficient and effective; none of those ways required consolidation. CAs generally love working together, and already do so in many ways; very few CAs support this consolidation.
The province continues to assure us that no staff will lose their jobs, but they also continue to talk about finding “administrative efficiencies”, which is a lovely euphemism for layoffs. As I said above, we have no fat to cut. Every single staff member at Lower Trent already wears multiple hats; if one program or role is reduced or cut, we lose one or two others at the same time because all of them were being done by the same person. Our administrative leadership team is doing their best to keep staff informed, but they all operate under incredible uncertainty, and morale is incredibly low. And those leadership staff are justifiably certain that “administrative efficiency” means that they’re the ones who are sure to lose their jobs: 8 CAs, each with their own Chief Administrative Officer, are being consolidated into one, which surely will not have 8 CAO positions. Lower Trent’s CAO has been stoic about it, and she’s doing a damn good job supporting her staff through all of this uncertainty, but most often that means telling them “I’m sorry, we just don’t know.”
That’s unacceptable to me.
The province also continues to say that they won’t be closing any offices. That’s good, because having local offices is integral to maintaining local knowledge, doing site visits, etc. If they tried to reduce the number of technical experts we need, they’d end up with scenarios where they have to send someone from an office in Quinte West up to a site in Kawartha Lakes to verify data; it would be incredibly wasteful. But if we’re not closing offices or losing staff, what is to be gained from the consolidation? What is actually being consolidated?
Local representation, for one. Instead of lower-tier municipalities being represented on the board (something initiated by the Ford government a few years ago; previously, CA boards had volunteer representatives from the community, agricultural reps, etc), the new Regional CAs will be presented by upper-tier (County or Region) and single-tier municipalities. How that will be apportioned is still unclear. What is clear is that Brighton will not have local representation on the new board, but Quinte West and Belleville and Peterborough and Kingston will. Northumberland County will have a representative, for an area made up of 7 lower-tier municipalities across at least 3 watersheds. There’s little real savings to be had here: boards are cheap to run (we don’t make much money for our time), and having local representation improves efficiency and effectiveness. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone at Northumberland County, who might be from Port Hope, making decisions about Butler Creek in Brighton alongside folks from Kingston and Peterborough.
Unanswered Questions
We’re now several months into this saga, and there are more unanswered questions than answered ones. I’ve met with two different MPPs from our watershed over the past few weeks, and they haven’t been able to answer them fully either.
Why? – Asking this always gets an answer that is vague generalities about finding efficiencies. As I hope is clear above, this is baffling to everyone I know who works with CAs, especially in our region. Lower Trent is already efficient – and we’d become a whole lot more effective with more funding. This plan does not include more funding, save for a one-time fund to cover the costs of the consolidation, and it appears that the added costs of administering the new Ontario Provincial Conservation Agency will be levied to municipalities too. This will almost certainly cost us more than the status quo, and any improvements that might come through amalgamating CAs could have come much more easily from a simple Memorandum of Understanding between us for shared services, or a change in mandate from the province.
Who? – Who asked for this? One MPP I spoke with said that the government has been lobbied a lot by municipalities who wanted change. I don’t know which municipalities those were, but they sure aren’t in the Lower Trent watershed. As I said above, another MPP I talked to complained that the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority runs a golf course, clearly outside their mandate (he thinks), suggesting that CAs need to be reined in. What does that have to do with Lower Trent being consolidated into a massive new structure in eastern Ontario? Notably, the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority was originally going to be the only CA that was not consolidated (now it will merge with Durham’s CAs). We also hear that the City of Hamilton has to deal with four CAs – four of them! Can you imagine! In fact I can: little Trent Hills has 3, and they’re doing just fine. And the Mayor of Hamilton has written to the province to ask them not to consolidate the CAs, so clearly they didn’t ask for this. And even with the consolidation, there will still be municipalities dealing with multiple CAs. And who will pay for it all? Still municipalities, though how it will be apportioned is unclear. Sorting out how much of the cost is paid by which municipalities is critical, and still a big question mark. We will be in a Regional CA represented by Northumberland County, but alongside cities like Peterborough (which has almost as many residents as all of Northumberland combined) and Kingston (which has half-again that number); but it still isn’t clear by what metric our share of the cost will be determined, and whether our share of the levy will be paid by the County or by Brighton directly.
How? – The province recently revealed a strategy to create a transitional committee of sorts. Our Chair and CAO will be sitting on it to represent Lower Trent, and they’ll spend the next six months hashing out the details of how the consolidation will work. Other than that, there doesn’t appear to be a plan; we’re moving forward at breakneck speed, and our plan is to figure it out as we go. Staff are in limbo, and some are quitting. The province will be putting in “guardrails” to stop CAs from making any big changes over the next few months, like selling property or changing org structures in ways that might help them save staff jobs. The when is clear: the date of consolidation is set for February 1st. How we get there is largely still a mystery.
The thing that I’ve told to the MPPs I’ve spoken with is that every time I hear the phrase “our municipal partners” from a representative of the provincial government, I think “it doesn’t feel like we’re partners.” This isn’t how you treat your partners. This is a top-down, heavy-handed consolidation of power, not of efficiency or effectiveness. We not only deserve better, but we would be willing partners who could contribute great things to our shared goals if we were brought in from the get-go with any sense that our feedback is respected. So far, there’s no sense that our feedback is respected at all. They tell us it is, and then do what they want anyway.
There has been some coverage of all of this, but it’s difficult for the press to cover a process that is so unclear, and often there’s too little interest in organizations that are so invisible to most people. If you want more information, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or Councillor Wright, or to your MPP. (If you live in Brighton, your MPP is David Piccini.) Please don’t reach out to Lower Trent Conservation Authority directly; they have more than enough on their plates right now.