Contrary to what you may have been told, the Town of Wasaga Beach is not protecting the beach’s critically endangered Piping Plovers against the imminent threats they now face.  It remains the federal environment’s job to protect them.

Late in 2025, Ontario’s government created an imminent threat to the survival and  recovery of  the endangered Piping Plover. It did that by erasing the Endangered Species Act and provincial park protection that have allowed the most important Canadian great lakes population of these birds to survive on one of Canada’s busiest and most intensely used public beaches. Now gone are  the strict bans and enforceable penalties used to deter beachgoers or maintenance and construction crews from wrecking their habitat. Also gone are the Provincial Park’s team of expert biologists hired to monitor the birds, rope off their habitat and install special protective exclosures  to protect the nests. So without federal action the odds of their holding on are very low indeed.

Months have now gone by since those reckless decisions, and the Piping Plovers are set to return to Wasaga Beach within weeks – typically they arrive in mid-April.  However, so far nobody has done what is required to save Wasaga’s Piping Plover habitat.  Not the federal minister – and despite the Mayor’s  assurances without action – not the Town of Wasaga Beach.

We know the Town itself has not taken even the steps it could take to mitigate the imminent threat to Piping Plover because we’ve askedthe town directly to do so. In particular we have asked:

• Will the Town have a bylaw in place by April, when the piping plover returns, that imposes the same prohibitions that used to be imposed by the Endangered Species Act before it was repealed?
• Has the town registered a binding conservation easement that empowers watchdogs, fully independent of the Town, to prevent maintenance crews or anyone else from damaging or destroying the habitat?
• Has the Town signed a binding stewardship agreement requiring that it hire and empower biologists to do all the protection work previously done by Provincial Park staff?
• Has the Town hired the biologists to do the protection work, or even put a job posting so they’ll be at work by April?
• Has the town obtained all the federal permits that would be required for its new staff to do, starting in April the protection and stewardship work that Ontario Parks used to do?

The answer to all of those clear questions? Crickets. Even the non-binding public statements  the Town has offered by way of assurances, such as mentions of a “no rake zone” for city maintenance crews in 2026 do not address the many other dangers created by the removal of Provincial Park and Endangered Species Act protection.

Given the Town’s failure to take even these bare minimum steps to mitigate the imminent threat to Wasaga Beach’s endangered Piping Plover, it would be even more unreasonable than it would otherwise have been for the Minister to decide to delay (let alone forego) a federal protection order.

To be clear, this is not a request for extraordinary federal intervention – or for the federal government to step on Ontario’s toes.  While it was reckless and wrong for the province to remove provincial protections, they plainly did it on the premise that the federal Species of Risk Act (SARA) would pick up the slack.  That’s because as soon as the province (or anyone else) creates an imminent threat like this one, the federal SARA kicks in automatically.  It requires the federal environment Minister to recommend an emergency protection order to her Cabinet colleagues to address the imminent threat: in this case one that would replaceE the protection the province has wiped out.

Time is running out.  With only a couple of weeks remaining, it’s unlikely that the Town  could get the measures requested in place before the Piping Plovers return.  The only acceptable course of action, the measure that every reliable approach to protecting the plover depends on, is for the federal government to immediately issue an emergency order  to mitigate the imminent threat to piping plover by replacing all the habitat protections that the provincial government removed to cause the threat.