Amending the Ontario Heritage Act
Introduction
In 2005, the Ministry of Culture posted a decision on Bill 60, an Act to amend the Ontario Heritage Act. The OHA, which had not been comprehensively amended since it was passed in 1975, is the principal law governing the conservation of Ontario’s heritage, covering special features of the built, cultural and natural environments. The changes to the Ontario Heritage Act give enhanced and additional powers to the province and municipalities to protect the heritage of Ontario – for example, the power to prohibit demolition of designated heritage buildings. Bill 60 also allows the province to establish better standards and guidelines to identify and protect provincially owned heritage properties, such as significant marine heritage sites and archaeological sites. The Act deals extensively with the conservation of built structures, usually historic, and the administration of cultural preservation; however, the ECO focused our review of this legislation on its natural heritage elements.
Most important for the ECO, Bill 60 revises and updates the mandate of Ontario’s principal heritage agency, the Ontario Heritage Trust. The Trust, which is overseen by the Ministry of Culture, is the province’s lead heritage agency and is dedicated to identifying, protecting and promoting Ontario’s heritage. The Trust holds for the people of Ontario a portfolio of more than 130 natural heritage properties, including over 90 properties that are part of the Bruce Trail. Protected land includes the habitats of endangered species, rare Carolinian forests, wetlands, sensitive features of the Oak Ridges Moraine, nature reserves on the Canadian Shield and properties on the Niagara Escarpment. The amendments to the OHA now formally recognize the role of the Trust in conserving the natural environment. Before the Bill 60 amendments, the Ontario Heritage Act referred to the Trust’s conservation role as limited only to “aesthetic and scenic environments.” These references now read “aesthetic, natural and scenic interest.”
While the Ontario Heritage Act was being amended, advocates for preserving trees attempted to have a provision introduced into Bill 60 that would permit a heritage designation for certain outstanding individual trees – for instance, because of a tree’s size, age, genetics or location. While this specific approach did not appear as a provision in the 2005 OHA amendments under Bill 60, actions by the ministry suggest that MCL is interested in encouraging municipalities to promote tree designation – municipalities would need to pass a bylaw that would draw upon criteria specified by MCL for determining whether a property is of “cultural heritage value or interest.” (As of June 2006, the criteria were still a proposal on the Environmental Registry.) MCL has also helped to fund the development of a heritage trees protection toolkit by the Ontario Heritage Tree Alliance, which has members from the Ontario Urban Forest Council and Community Heritage Ontario.
Public participation and the EBR process
There were three comments on the proposal for amending the OHA, all agreeing with the direction of the legislation and encouraging MCL to hasten the process of passing the legislation. For its part, MCL compared Bill 60 to its Statement of Environmental Values, noting consistencies between building preservation and environmental protection: The protection of cultural heritage is directly linked to the protection of the natural environment. Conservation of cultural heritage resources contributes to reducing urban sprawl, intensifying development, rehabilitation of brownfields, and reducing construction waste that may otherwise go to landfill.
The adaptive re-use of heritage buildings keeps greenfield land available for wildlife, requires less energy for the manufacture of new materials, uses less landfill space, and their predominately inner city location reduce commuting and consequent greenhouse gas emissions.
ECO Comment
The ECO hopes that the Ministry of Culture and the Ontario Heritage Trust will play strong leadership roles in protecting Ontario’s natural heritage. The ECO believes it is appropriate that the legislation now acknowledges the natural heritage functions being carried out by the Trust. This acknowledgement is long overdue. The Trust’s predecessor, the Ontario Heritage Foundation, was a forerunner in Ontario of establishing conservation easements, used to protect natural spaces through a designation on a property title and avoiding the costlier route of outright purchase of the land. Some of the pioneering work of the Foundation was in the Niagara Escarpment Plan Area, where conservation easements helped create continuous greenspace corridors for wildlife, trails and habitat protection.
In autumn 2005, representatives of the Ministry of Natural Resources told the ECO that the province’s key program for acquiring land in order to protect natural heritage, the Ecological Land Acquisition Program, was being reinvented within the Ontario Heritage Trust under the Natural Spaces Land Acquisition and Stewardship Program (NSLASP). The ECO has some concern that a program with a primary ecological focus is being transferred to an agency whose primary focus is protecting properties for their cultural values. This could lead to a shift in the program over time in which properties that have cultural values – for example, a recreational property or one of historic importance in addition to some ecological value – are favoured over properties that have purely ecological value, for instance, a property with rare vegetation. MNR contends that it will continue to play a strategic leadership role in securing ecologically significant lands in Ontario.
The ECO will continue to monitor conservation land acquisition developments, as we have in the past, now that the Ontario Heritage Trust will be the province’s primary agent in this capacity. (For more on the financing of the province’s land acquisition programs, see Land Acquisition Program Update.). In that regard, the ECO was disappointed to note in February 2006 that the Ontario Heritage Trust proceeded to post elements of its new land acquisition program on its Web site without first posting the program as a proposal on the Environmental Registry. In effect, the Trust has begun to roll out the program without first consulting members of the public, who have a strong interest in how the funding for acquiring land is allocated. This is problematic. For many conservation groups in Ontario, acquiring significant lands, habitats and ecosystems for their preservation is a core reason for their existence and a goal to which their members are dedicated. Land acquisition projects are long term, and they require both volunteer and real financial resources to carry out. Even when government funding is achieved for certain projects, the responsibility to protect the land or habitat on an ongoing basis rests with a conservation group, which is often volunteer-based.
For all of these reasons, conservation groups and the Ontario public have a strong interest in being able to comment on any proposed provincial land acquisition programs – no matter which ministry or agency happens to be operating the program. Accordingly, the ECO wrote to the Ministry of Culture in 2006 advising that the ministry should have considered posting the details of the NSLASP program as a proposal on the Environmental Registry. Furthermore, the ECO wrote that MCL should pursue making the Ontario Heritage Trust subject to Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights. (For more detail on this issue, see the Supplement to this report, pages 293-294. For ministry comments, see page(s) 216.)
| Recommendation 6:
The ECO recommends to the Ministry of Culture that the Ontario Heritage Trust become an EBR-prescribed agency. |
| This is an article from the 2005/06 Annual Report to the Legislature from the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. |
Citing This Article:
Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 2006. "Amending the Ontario Heritage Act." Neglecting our Obligations, ECO Annual Report, 2005-06. Toronto, ON : Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 76-79.
