Opinion: Environmental regulation enforcement lacking in farm country

There is no shortage of environmental regulations in this province. Indeed, some people are concerned that regulatory burdens unnecessarily infringe on how farmers, other business owners and regional authorities conduct day-to-day business.

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From my perspective in southwestern Ontario, all the regulation in the world has failed to stop a range of serious, long-running pollution problems.

This is to be expected, of course, when uniform enforcement is absent.

Enforcement of existing regulations in my part of the province leaves much to be desired, allowing bad actors to get away with some pretty egregious behaviour. Put another way, it seems as if the Environment, Conservation and Parks ministry, and the province more broadly, are knowingly shirking their duties, forsaking much of rural Ontario in the process.

Several experiences have brought me to this position, some of which I’ve encountered in my journalistic capacity, others as a rural resident.

Within a stone’s throw of where I live, for example, two enterprises are seriously violating waste disposal regulations. I will refrain from specifically identifying them for what I hope are obvious reasons. Both enterprises are known to the ministry, having been caught willfully polluting on a previous occasion.

Despite violations again reported, sometimes repeatedly, by regional authorities who themselves having little power to stop unscrupulous actors, the destructive behaviour continues.

Another example, told to me by a colleague in the conservation sector, involved a development company dumping contaminated soil, trucked from the Toronto area, into a rural creek bed hours from the city. The company was reported and the ministry responded — and decided to neither charge the company nor order removal of the dumped cargo.

One has to wonder whether such behaviour would be tolerated if it occurred next to a popular tourist destination instead of on the backroads of a rural county seldom visited by non-residents. I suspect not.

Cases like these are not uncommon. Ten minutes of conversation in any rural community coffee shop is likely to prove the point. But there are higher profile pollution issues, too, which remain similarly unaddressed by the ministry.

Significant and endemic watercourse pollution from Essex County’s large greenhouse sector is an issue known to the ministry since at least 2012, a year when it released a report identifying several greenhouse-heavy Essex County drains as “the most polluted in the province of Ontario with respect to phosphorus and nitrate.”

Little was done, and the problem has become worse. Even with fresh evidence from a subsequent decade-long research study, the ministry has failed to make any serious, proactive headway with either the greenhouse sector or local authorities.

As Hilda MacDonald, mayor of Leamington and reeve for Essex County, told me when covering the issue in 2023, the Ontario’s environment ministry has “fallen down on the job … Where the hell are they?”

Ill-formed regulation can itself be a problem. A bureaucrat working for my local government, for example, recently described their frustration with how the municipality has to manage on-site and excess soils in construction projects (part of Ontario regulation 406/19 in the Environmental Protection Act).

According to this individual, the regulation is well intentioned but overly prescriptive, and they “are not sure how [the ministry] will ever be able to deal with enforcement and non-compliance.”

Another thing the ministry isn’t doing – providing journalists with useful information or perspective. When I contacted its media representatives over the aforementioned greenhouse sector nutrient pollution issue, I received only an acknowledgement that they had received my request for comment.

I wasn’t expecting to receive anything groundbreaking in response. I know several colleagues who regularly make inquiries with various provincial ministries, and receive little to nothing in return. But even a generic comment would have been nice, given I had afforded them a fortnight to do so.

To be fair to the communications person who acknowledged my inquiry, it’s likely someone further up the chain of command who failed to provide answers.

Another conversation, this time with an actual ministry enforcement officer, revealed on-the-ground struggle to enforce compliance with very limited resources. This individual’s tone was tired and resigned as they detailed funding cuts, the difficulty of attracting and keeping an effective workforce, and other challenges in the face of ever more development.

It would be naïve to expect our current development-obsessed provincial government to support environmental improvement, or actually worry about bad actors. For Ford and the blue crew, the environment always matters — until there’s an opportunity to pave it.

Even so, I suspect the ministry’s lack of engagement in both public discourse and in the field, is also a result of systemic cultural aversion to taking actions that might upset people.

Government inaccessibility and accountability is a real problem, generally, and I’ve yet to meet a journalist who has not expressed this sentiment to some degree.

All considered, Ontario’s environment ministry appears toothless and top-heavy; an administrative behemoth slow to move its gaze, seemingly loath to exert itself and often incapable of empowering people on the ground.

Combined with an unsupportive and aloof provincial government – the authority which ultimately bears responsibility – I suppose it’s no mystery why it can’t keep up with the breadth and variety of creative business practice happening in rural Ontario.