Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks to media at Queen’s Park in Toronto, on April 3.Laura Proctor/The Canadian Press
The entire country loves Ontario Premier Doug Ford when he stands up for Canada against U.S. President Donald Trump‘s expansionist fantasies. Canadians have swooned and cheered when our bully goes toe-to-toe with America’s.
But lately, Mr. Ford has been acting like Mr. Trump himself, here in Ontario – using his party’s majority government to live by his own rules, trampling over existing laws and introducing new ones that allow reckless, unchecked development without any say from First Nations peoples, whose treaties make up the province of Ontario. And don’t worry, municipal governments: you’ve been left out, too.
It’s a failure that’s as big as Mr. Ford’s disastrous efforts to develop the Greenbelt, but with one key difference: the development here is happening largely out of sight, as the legislation is aimed at the swath of the province that lies north of Thunder Bay and stretches out to Hudson Bay, James Bay and the Manitoba border.
His government has put forward Bill 5 – the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, 2025 – and it is even audacious in its title. The substance of this bill does not protect Ontario; it pulverizes it. It promises to enact what Mr. Ford has trumpeted in television ads and in media clips: that he will not wait any longer, expediting the process by which companies can pluck out those critical minerals Mr. Trump and the world crave to make their electric car batteries and high-tech devices.
If passed – the omnibus legislation has been rammed through second reading and is now in committee – it would gut the Endangered Species Act and create new “special economic zones” that are immune to the provincial rules, policies and regulations that are enforced everywhere else in Ontario, all so that new mines can move forward and highways can be built. These new zones would exempt “trusted proponents” and certain areas from both municipal oversight and any regulations.
In effect, Mr. Ford is creating lawless carveouts – places where the mining industry can bypass environmental protections and, potentially, the constitutional duty to consult with First Nations people. It’s an egregious attack on Aboriginal and Treaty rights.
It even tosses out environmental assessments that companies have already agreed to undertake. Bill 5 goes so far as to name individual existing projects, such as Wyloo’s Eagle Nest mine in the Ring of Fire, and negate their requirements. Does this mean that all new mines in Ontario will no longer need any environmental review moving ahead? The bill is dangerously unclear on the question.
And what if developers encounter archaeological sites, evidence of First Nations communities from thousands of years ago? In Rome, development would stop, tents would be put up and evidence of human life would be lovingly handled. The attitude in Ontario, based on what is laid out in this bill, seems to be the opposite; developers would ask the minister in charge, and he or she would have sole discretion on deciding whether what is found is worth saving.
But these lands are not for Ontario to do with as it wishes, says Donny Morris, Chief of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug. “Whatever Ford and his government might want their base to think,” he said in an April 24 statement, “nothing is happening up here without our consent.”
As First Nations people, it is our sacred duty to speak for the four-leggeds. Under Bill 5, those protected species living in the Ring of Fire area – caribou, wolverines, migratory birds, fish – will have protections removed. Instead, Cabinet will be authorized to make new regulations, listing species that are classified as “extirpated species, endangered species, threatened species or special-concern species.”
What audacity the province has, to consistently ignore and pay lip service to the treaties that built this country and the First Nations peoples who know how to defend it. What happens when Mr. Trump and his threats of takeover and punishing tariffs have subsided or are no longer relevant? You won’t be able to bring back all the animals that have died or become habitat-less in the name of prosperity. You can’t regrow a boreal forest or peat moss in a couple of years to serve as a carbon sink for a dangerously warm planet.
Is this what the Ontario government has come to – transforming the province into a place where government deems itself as the only one qualified to make the rules, and where science and Indigenous knowledge are dismissed?
It’s a spirit that sounds dangerously similar to what is being wrought by the current White House. It’s ironic – and tragic – that Mr. Ford appears to be transforming into the very threat he says he is trying to defend Canadians against.