Federal judge sides with tiny chorus frog, rules against developer
It’s the size of your fingertip, but this tiny frog has some big legal protection.
In late June, a Federal Court judge ruled that the federal government had the right to issue an emergency protection order, which shrunk a development already under construction in La Prairie, to protect the breeding grounds of the western chorus frog. The frog, which averages around 2.5 centimetres long, is one of the smallest frogs that lives in Quebec. While it’s not an endangered species globally, it is considered threatened in Quebec and Ontario.
One of the most threatened metapopulations — a group of populations of the same species, separated by space, that occasionally interact — is in the La Prairie area, according to the federal government’s Species at Risk Public Registry. There, almost 60 per cent of the frog ’s habitat was destroyed between 1992 and 2013. In 2004, the frog had 89 breeding ponds in the area. By 2014, 44 were left.
In July 2016, federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna issued an emergency protection order under the Species at Risk Act that created a two-square-kilometre protected area in the South Shore municipalities of La Prairie, Candiac and St-Philippe where no development would be permitted.
The decision forced a residential development — already under construction with the approval of the municipality and Quebec’s environment ministry — to be reduced by 171 units.
It was an almost unprecedented move — just the second time since the Species at Risk Act was passed in 2002 that an emergency protection order had been issued, and the first time it had been used to block a development on private land.
One of the developers behind the affected project, Groupe Maison Candiac, sued the federal government, claiming the emergency protection order was unconstitutional because it constituted a form of expropriation without compensation.
However, Justice René LeBlanc sided with the federal government, ruling that it had the right to protect the land and that it wasn’t a form of disguised expropriation.
In his decision, he wrote that judges have recognized that the responsibility of human beings toward the environment is a “fundamental societal value” and that this responsibility doesn’t end with preventing toxic substances from being released into the environment, but also includes preventing “the loss of biodiversity resulting from human activity” due to the fact that it “impoverishes the environment.”
Environmental groups have praised the decision.
“This incentivizes the government of Canada, the government of Quebec and also the governments of other provinces to be more regulative about the protection of endangered species and their habitat,” said Gabriel Cliche, a project manager at Fondation Rivières. “That’s a big gain, we think, for the environment and the conservation of life.”
He said he hopes the decision will encourage the federal government to deny approval for a plan to expand the Port of Montreal to Contrecoeur.
“That will definitely affect the habitat of the western chorus frog,” he said.
He said he hopes the decision will also encourage the provincial government to take stronger steps to protect wetlands in particular.
On Friday, Anne-Hélène Couturier, the communications director for provincial environment minister Isabelle Melançon, said the protection of endangered species was of great concern for the provincial government but that she could not comment further as the matter was still before the courts.
Groupe Maison Candiac has said it plans to appeal the ruling.