Ontario’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change has in the past year “generally discharged its duties well under the Environmental Bill of Rights,” says the latest report from the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario.
The government, notably through the MOECC and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, has generally shown progress in three of the four areas that needed “significant improvement,” according to Good Choices, Bad Choices:
• Ministries made modest progress by making the content of their notices for instruments (e.g., approvals, permits, and licences) more relevant to the public and easier to understand.
• Ministries reduced the total number of outdated proposal notices on the Environmental Registry by over 80%. Only four ministries still had outdated proposals on the Environmental Registry at the end of the reporting year.
• Ministries concluded four of the seven overdue applications for review that the Commission identified in 2015/2016.
The ECO commended the MOECC for setting up its Environmental Activity and Sector Registry (EASR), which allows some low-risk environmental activities to be more simply regulated through an online permit-by-rule system instead of requiring individual approvals for every single activity.
One deficiency the Commissioner noted, on the part of both MOECC and MNRF, was the timeliness by which decision notices are posted on the Environmental Registry.
The report is available at eco.on.ca.