On March 30th, 2026, the Ford government repealed Ontario’s Endangered Species Act. For almost two decades it was considered the strongest law of its kind in Canada, because it protected both endangered species and their habitats from any activities that would harm them. Now, it’s gone. In its place is the Species Conservation Act, 2025, a law built to move projects faster, not to keep species alive.

The new law shrinks “habitat” down to a den or a nest and the ground immediately around it, not the wetland, forest, or shoreline an animal actually uses to feed and raise its young. Expert review is gone: a developer registers a project online and can start as soon as the developer declares the project qualifies, with no government decision in between. Recovery strategies are no longer required, and a list of activities is excepted from registration entirely. Woodland caribou, barn owls, and golden eagles are all left exposed by it.

More than 100 species were dropped from Ontario’s list of species at risk, including the endangered and threatened fish and migratory birds now left to the federal government. For most land-dwelling species at risk, federal protection applies only on federal land, which covers less than five per cent of their range. And because the new act exempts itself from the Environmental Bill of Rights, work that could wipe out an at-risk habitat no longer has to be posted for you to see, let alone comment on.

We have seen this pattern before. Greenbelt land handed to PC donors. Conservation authorities forced into amalgamation. Farmland paved for highways nobody asked for. Ontarians filed more than 61,000 comments opposing Bill 5, and Doug Ford passed it anyway. The rich and well connected get the decision, and the rest of us get the consequences.

Cancel Bill 5: repeal the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, 2025 and the registration-first regime it created.