The Ministry of the Environment has failed to uphold its standards across a wide range of activities as Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk took the government to task for abdicating its green responsibilities.

Those shortcomings, according to the AG's annual environmental report, include:

The Ministry of the Environment, as well as some other ministries, failing to uphold environmental consultation requirements
Ministries have failed to uphold legislated environment reporting requirements
Development projects that may harm species at risk are automatically approved as "staff have no direction on when to reject applications that would do harm," according to the AG

It was another damning environmental report for a government that has frequently been criticized for loosening regulations in favour of development and industry, watering down climate change targets and policies and failing to follow through on its own legislated requirements.

The report lands at a time when the Ford government is trying to adopt a softer and more moderate tone in the leadup to the 2022 election, and when environmental stories have increasingly topped headlines given the COP26 summit in Glasgow and the devastating floods in British Columbia.

Lysyk's report found that rather than acting as a leader to other ministries on various environmental issues within the Ford government, the Ministry of the Environment was a prime culprit in the shortcomings. "The Environment Ministry's actions amount to undermining the Environment Bill of Rights (EBR), a law that we would expect the ministry would be championing," said Lysyk, referring to failures in environmental consultation that the AG's office called "deliberate." She pointed to the government not consulting the public on changes to the Environment Assessment Act and then retroactively legislating an exemption that it didn't need to as one example.

The AG's office also found that the Ministry of the Environment failed to fully meet the criteria in 10 of 13 Environment Bill of Rights categories, as evaluated in the report's annual report card. That assessment placed it as the worst ministry in the overview. The ministry partially met the criteria in six categories, and did not meet the criteria in four. It only upheld the criteria in three.

In a government response to the EBR findings, the Ministry of the Environment did not indicate a clear agreement to seven of 61 recommendations and maintained it is meeting the law as written. "The government respects and takes our obligations under the Environmental Bill of Rights, 1993 seriously," it stated. "The Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks is meeting its legislative obligations under the EBR Act, enabling Ontarians to participate in important environmental decisions."

The Ford government has also failed to follow through on 11 of 22 action items outlined in a scathing 2019 AG report on Ontario's climate change plan. Among the items it has not moved on include naming an advisory climate change panel, establishing better methods to estimate emissions reductions, that the ministry of the environment work with other ministries to update detailed actions on how to address climate change and more.

The AG also flagged two other significant issues. She found that a failure to take concrete action to increase waste diversion rates about industry and businesses "would likely" mean that the province's landfills will be at capacity in the next 11 to 14 years. That's in part because residences divert their waste at a 50 per cent rate, but industry and businesses only do so at a 15 per cent rate.

The AG also found that the government almost never assesses penalties for hazardous spills, only doing so in three instances of 73,000 over the past decade.

Environment Ministry failing to uphold its standards: AG

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