Speaker 1: Our next speaker is Chris Darling, who's the Director of Development, Review and Regulations with the Central Lake Ontario Conservation Authority. And Chris will be speaking on conservation authority planning and regulatory oversight. Chris is a registered professional planner with over 20 years of land use planning experience. He's the Director of Development, Review and Regulations with the Convention of the CLOCA, where in this capacity he led the development of CLOCA's large fill policy, which has been in effect since 2010. Chris joined CLOCA following positions as the Principal Planner for the Region of Durham and the Director of Development

Speaker 2: Thanks Rob. Good morning everyone. That's a little better. So as Rob indicated, what I'm going to do this morning is give everyone the Conservation Authority's perspective on large fill sites. So to do this, I'm going to cover five main points. First, I'm going to provide a little background context in terms of the amount of fill activity that has occurred within CLOCA's jurisdiction over the past several years. Then I'm going to go into a little more detail in terms of explaining the legal jurisdiction the Conservation Authorities have with respect to permitting large fill sites. Then I'm going to go in and summarize two documents. The first is the Conservation Ontario's discussion paper on large fill sites. And the second is CLOCA's approved large fill policy. And then finally I'm going to conclude by going through and highlighting a number of gaps and potential solutions, again, under the lens of Conservation Authorities. So just quickly, Conservation Authorities are natural resource management agencies. We have a mandate to ensure the conservation, protection, and responsible management of materials, land, water, and natural habitats. There are 36 Conservation Authorities across the province. This map illustrates the geographical boundaries of the watershed of CLOCA. You can see that it includes the town of Whitby, city of Oshawa, and parts of the municipality of Clarenton, Skugog, Uxbridge, Ajax, and Pickering. So in terms of the context of the amount of fill that we've seen in our watershed in the past several years, I think it's fair to say that the movement of large amounts of fill and the placement of fill is certainly not new within our watershed or the GTA, but since about 2007, we've seen an increasing number of large fill sites and associated volumes. So we did a bit of number crunching back at the office and we found that since 2007, we've issued approximately 30 permits for large fill sites within our regulated areas. 30 permits for large fills, we define large fill permits as 500 cubic metres or more. So our total of those 30 permits is approximately 6 million cubic metres of fill that's been placed, again, on our regulated areas. And I'll get into the regulation part later on, but just quickly, we regulate about 30% of our watershed. So if you were to actually estimate what the fill could be across our entire jurisdiction, it could be upwards of 20 million cubic metres. So I started to think, what does 6 million cubic metres of fill actually look like? I really had no idea, so we did a bit of research and have a few examples. So this is one picture of one of the famous Egyptian pyramids, which happens to have a capacity of about 2.5 million cubic metres. So again, since 2007, there would have been a little more than two of these in terms of equivalent fill placed in a regulated area. And I have one more example a little closer to home. It's the Rogers Centre, which from the floor to the roof has a capacity of about 1.5 million cubic metres. So again, the amount of fill since 2007 in our regulated areas could have filled about four Rogers Centres. So how are conservation authorities involved in permitting large fill sites? We're involved through the administration of provincial regulation under the Conservation Act, Section 28. These regulations are not new. In fact, they've been in place since the mid-1950s and 60s. They were brought about in response to the property and human losses associated with Hurricane Hazel. The first renditions of the regulations were somewhat of a blunt instrument. They focused largely on, again, addressing hazards associated with flooding and erosion, and they actually regulated an entire lot in concessions. The regulations we deal with today, after several amendments, are more feature-based, and they also regulate wetlands as well. So the features that we regulate include the Lake Ontario shoreline, so the flood and erosion hazards associated with the Lake Ontario, watercourses, valley systems, floodplains, and erosion hazards, and there's an adjacent lands buffer that's applied to all those features of 15 metres. And again, we also regulate wetlands, and the adjacent buffer for that is either 30 or 120 metres, depending on the size of the wetland. The regulation also specifies that if an activity could interfere with the hydrological function of a wetland, that activity can also be regulated. So there could be situations where you have large fill sites that are actually beyond the 30 or 120 metre, beyond the regulated mapping, that again could be regulated. This is what the mapping looks like in our watershed. The green shaded areas are our regulated areas, and again, as I said, it represents about 30% of our watershed. So again, just going back to the 6 million cubic metres, in fact, because we don't allow large fill placement in watercourses and wetlands, you're actually looking at that much volume in probably somewhere closer to 5 or 10% of our entire watershed. The regulation specifies that all development, again, within those regulated areas must obtain a permission or permit from the Conservation Authority, and the term development is defined in the legislation and includes a typical type of thing such as change in land uses and structures and buildings, but it also includes the temporary or permanent placing of materials, so large fill placement would be a regulated activity. The regulation specifies that the Conservation Authority can issue a permission, provided they are of the opinion that the control of flooding, erosion, dynamic beaches, pollution of the conservation of land will not be affected. These are quite often referred to as the five tests that have to be met and demonstrated before a Conservation Authority can issue a permit. So basically, if we're looking at, again, a large fill operation, the Conservation Authority can issue a permit, provided that it's been demonstrated that they won't be creating or aggravating a natural hazard, or they won't be adversely affecting the environment. The regulation also specifies that the CA can issue a permit subject to conditions. So what this means is the regulations are really a technical document, and that they're very effective in addressing issues, again, around natural hazards and protecting features such as wetlands and watercourses. What the regulation is not very effective in is addressing what you might call public concerns. So these could include things such as consideration of the purpose of the placement of fill, what is the end land use, addressing impacts such as noise and dust, and even the whole issue about public notification. Again, the regulations are a very technical process. There actually is no provision for third-party involvement at all. So you can see that there is a bit of an issue in terms of being able to address some of these public issues under regulation. And just to highlight why this is becoming more of an issue is because under the Municipal Act, there's a provision that indicates that municipal site alteration bylaws have no effect in CA-regulated areas. So you've heard from the township of Scugog, and there are many townships throughout the GTA and beyond that have updated their site alteration bylaws to address a lot of these public concerns. Well, because they no longer have effect in the CA areas, there's a bit of a gap there in terms of municipalities losing one tool they can use to address these issues. And I'll talk about this at length when we get into the gaps and solutions, but for now I'm going to move into, again, providing a summary of the two documents. So I'll start with the Conservation Ontario discussion paper on large fill sites. It was really written for the purpose of conservation authorities and it had three purposes. The first one was to bring awareness to all conservation authorities of the emerging and ongoing issue of the placement of large fill. It was to establish a number of best management practices that conservation authorities could employ when administering the regulations. And finally, it also dealt with establishing a consistent framework that all conservation authorities could use when reviewing issues around large fill sites. Just a couple of key highlights. One of the things the discussion paper did was it dealt with the issue, again, of not having the ability to deal with some of these public concerns, so there was a number of recommendations included in the paper to talk about the importance of coordinating consulting with municipalities when CAs are reviewing permits for large fill sites. It spoke at length about the way the CA can make sure that the test of control pollution is addressed by way of asking for certain technical reports. It also spoke to, again, what I mentioned before in terms of the ability of certain activities, i.e. fill sites being a regulated activity, even though it's beyond, again, the regulatory mapping if it has the interference to wetlands. And it also included a number of recommendations in which CAs could use to determine whether or not a complete application is submitted such that they can make a decision under the five tests. And it also included a number of recommendations that CAs can use in terms of ongoing compliance and making sure that the fill operation is consistent with the conditions of the permit. Now I've got a couple of slides here to summarize CLOCA's board-approved policy. It was approved in 2010 and it's been updated several times since. In fact, it was updated by a board of directors at their meeting in January a few weeks ago. Some of the fundamental principles that went into developing CLOCA's large fill policy, again, was to, first of all, make sure that when the conservation authority is making decisions under the regulations that the five tests are strictly applied. There was also a bit of a balancing act when we were putting the large policy into effect and that we were trying to find a balancing point between making sure that there was a fair and consistent framework to administer to all contactors or applicants for large fill sites, but still having flexibility to add unique requirements depending, again, on the associated risks that might be involved in large fill sites. So if you had a fill site for 600 cubic meters versus 60,000, you could deal with them somewhat differently. Some of the key highlights in there, and this is something you've heard from the Ministry of Environment, there's a description of what makes up a complete application for large fill sites, so things such as pre-fill elevations of the receiving site, erosion control plans, potentially environment impact studies, and a soil management plan, which, again, is consistent with what the Ministry of Environment has done with their best management paper. The large fill policy has also a number of mandatory conditions that are applied to all fill applications. They include things such as a financial deposit to the conservation authority for the purposes of undertaking a peer review of the technical reports that are submitted and or independent sampling of the source site and receiving site. Again, it also spoke to the importance of consultation with our municipalities when we were looking at applications for large fill sites. It speaks to the need for post-elevation surveys once the fill activity has been completed, and confirmation from a qualified person that drainage patterns are going to be maintained. And finally, there's a number of conditions in our large fill policy that speaks to, again, the whole issue of tracking fill from the source site to the receiving site in terms of looking at chain of custody and technical reports qualifying the quality of fill at both locations. So, what are some of the gaps in solutions, again, from a conservation authority's perspective? I could put these into two broad categories. The first, again, is the whole issue around the dealing with some of these public concerns or social concerns that are really outside of the scope of the five tests under the regulation. Some of these are already employed. Like I mentioned before, the municipal consultation is widely used throughout all CAs. Of course, even though site alteration bylaws have no effect in the CA regulated area, there are certainly other tools that municipalities can use to deal with some of these issues, such as noise bylaws and nuisance bylaws. Some of the other potential solutions that I don't know have been quite explored yet that may be considered would be amending the Municipal Act so that site alteration bylaws and CA regs apply throughout the watershed. And, finally, another consideration, I know there's been some discussions at various workshops, is to deal with large-scale fail sites as a change of land use, such that they would be considered in the Planning Act, and then you actually establish a formal public consultation process. The last category of gaps that you could characterize them as administrative type of issues. The first is, again, the whole issue of dealing with the acceptable level of soil quality for the receiving site, and being able to do your due diligence to make sure that, again, it's not going to result in any adverse impacts. And, again, a lot of the recommendations that came out of the Ministry's best management practices, as well as some of the recommendations in CLOCA's large fill policy, talked to about minimum standards for sampling both at the source site and the receiving site, but we also require a qualified person to tell us what beyond that minimum standard should be applied. We also have, in our new CLOCA policy, a number of conditions relating to, again, the chain of custody from, again, the source site to the receiving site, as well as a chain of custody from when the sample is taken to when it's taken to a lab, as well. The whole issue of taking financial securities is somewhat new and somewhat limited among conservation authorities, but I think it's certainly an area that all CAs should start to look at in terms of taking securities in case the permit isn't complied with, so that you have ability to take some action. And the final recommendation that I'll leave you with, and again, this is something that was touched upon by the Minister of Environment in their paper, was the development of municipal fill strategies. So this deals with the whole issue about the municipal procurement process that was mentioned earlier, but it also deals with the whole issue of municipalities looking at what are their fill needs over the years in terms of infrastructure works, is there a deficit, is there a surplus, and trying to balance that as well. And even potentially looking at, through their municipalities, should there be pre-identified fill sites identified in appropriate locations to minimize impacts. And with that, I'll leave it there. Thank you.