MPP fails in bid to reveal how wildlife fees spent

A London-area MPP says his fight for greater transparency in how money from provincial hunting and licensing fees is spent isn’t over yet, despite his bid to tighten the rules being shot down.

Progressive Conservative MPP Jeff Yurek had introduced a private member’s bill earlier this week to beef up spending requirements for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry’s so-called special purpose account (SPA), a fund that collects nearly $75 million a year from licensing fees paid by anglers and hunters.

The money is supposed be spent on wildlife management and to improve angling and hunting across the province, but the handling of the fund has come under fire in recent years over a perceived lack of transparency and questionable expenditures.

The bill was rejected 23-15 after being debated at Queen’s Park Thursday.

“June 7 is around the corner and I hope hunters and anglers make this an election issue,” Yurek, the Elgin-Middlesex-London MPP, said Friday, referencing the upcoming Ontario election.

The bill was defeated just hours after a Southwestern Ontario group representing hunters and anglers applauded the proposed legislation, calling it long overdue. “It has flown under the radar for long enough,” Ken Currah, director of the Aylmer Stakeholders Committee, said of the fund. Troubling details about how the fund was used emerged after the Aylmer group — representing 1,400 Southwestern Ontario landowners, hunters and farmers — applied for $10,000 to evaluate deer populations in the Elgin, Middlesex and Oxford wildlife zone. The organization was denied its appeal, prompting it to file a freedom-of-information request to get the details of how the fund was being spent.

After years of delay, the ministry turned over a list of expenditures for 2011-2012. Included was $65,000 to buy and sell a house, $4,000 for rental accommodations and $12,251 for psychologists. Yurek, who represents Elgin-Middlesex-London, said the fund’s lack of transparency had been on his radar since he was elected in 2011. At one point, the ministry had fallen five years behind publishing its annual report on the fund, Yurek said.

“That raised red flags at the time then,” Yurek said. “They are caught

June 7 is around the corner and I hope hunters and anglers make this an election issue.

up with this annual report, but it is not detailed, it is broad.”

The proposed bill would have streamlined how the fund is paid out to ensure the money goes to fish and wildlife management and created an advisory committee and avenue for hunters and anglers to inquire about expenditures, said Yurek, who acknowledged private members bills from opposition politicians rarely become law. The ministry previously defended the spending from the special account, saying staff salaries and benefits for staff performing fish and wildlife management activities are paid from the account. “They ’re using the fund to backfill a shortage elsewhere,” Currah said, adding fees paid by hunters and anglers keep going up, while