Legislation that Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives are working on passing with the goal of “unleashing” Ontario’s economy now faces challenges from at least a couple of angles.
Bill 5, which the Ford government titled the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, is at the root of a recent request for an investigation that the Ontario Liberals are asking the province’s integrity commissioner’s office to launch.
The legislation singles out a Dresden landfill, proposing to exempt it from an environmental assessment promised by the PCs a year ago.
On Friday, an exclusive report by The Trillium revealed a few notable connections shared by Ford’s party and the landfill’s owners, who, with their families and companies’ executives, are also major PC donors. Later that day, Liberal MPP Ted Hsu published a letter he wrote to the Office of the Integrity Commissioner of Ontario, asking it to investigate Ford and multiple cabinet ministers for “decisions surrounding the Dresden landfill site.”
“We’re confronting a troubling question: is public policy in Ontario for sale? … The optics of this are disturbing and troubling. One might reasonably infer that access and political contributions improperly influenced public policy,” Hsu said at a media event on Monday. “That’s why we’re calling for an investigation into this matter by the integrity commissioner.”
Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie, who along with a couple of other Liberal MPPs joined Hsu at a news conference at Queen’s Park, added, “Dresden deserves better and we’re going to fight to be sure it gets better.”
They also called on the government to remove the Dresden landfill-specific portion of Bill 5. In responding on Monday to questions from Liberal MPPs about the landfill, Environment Minister Todd McCarthy indicated that the government plans to push forward with its legislation, as is.
“We must address our landfill capacity challenges,” McCarthy said, as part of a response to one question.
Bill 5’s impact would reach far wider than just Dresden, with the part that would exempt the landfill from an environmental assessment representing just a sliver of it. The legislation would amend several existing laws and create a couple of new ones, including a Special Economic Zones Act. The proposed act would empower the government to designate areas as “special economic zones,” where projects could then be exempted from the requirements of any other provincial laws or regulations. The Ring of Fire is one place the Ford government has suggested it would apply this designation, to help speed up how quickly its minerals can be extracted.
On Monday, as well, representatives from Indigenous groups, Environmental Defence and Democracy Watch visited Queen’s Park to call on the Ford government to abandon the “special economic zones” idea altogether. They argued that the proposed law would trample over Indigenous communities’ rights.
Environmental Defence executive director Tim Gray and Democracy Watch co-founder Duff Conacher also left the door open to the possibility that their organizations could participate in challenging the law in court, if it’s passed.
PC MPPs controlling the majority of seats at Queen’s Park voted last week to pass Bill 5 along to a committee for further study, which is expected to begin next week.
—With files from Jesmeen Gill
