Local MPP'S bill seeks to protect urban parks

A local member of provincial Parliament is pushing for a new classification to help protect natural urban areas in Ontario.

MPP Andrew Dowie (PC — Windsor-tecumseh), who is also an assistant to the environment minister, introduced Bill 193 in the legislature this week.

If passed, the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Amendment Act would create an urban provincial park classification — extending official protection, for the first time, to provincially significant biodiverse areas located within or near large urban areas.

“This is a tool to open protections to make them more compatible with urban environments and allow us to protect lands that we surely should be protecting,” Dowie said.

He said there is an opportunity for Ontario's parks system, covering a swath of land measuring more than 78,000 square kilometres, to also include natural urban areas.

“Some properties are best left as municipal parks or local conservation areas,” said Dowie. “But if they are provincially significant, then it's certainly a way that the province can participate in protecting them by providing a provincial urban park designation.”

Dowie said the bill would also support the establishment of the province's first urban provincial park in the Township of Uxbridge that the Ontario government announced in April last year.

He said he wants to explore the creation of additional urban provincial parks, beyond Uxbridge, and having the classification would “make it pretty easy.”

Dowie said his proposal was inspired by “the work that's been happening locally with Ojibway National Urban Park” that identified “a role for natural environment and biodiversity protection within an urban footprint that's within walking distance of where people live.”

The urban provincial park classification would prop the federal government's effort to designate national urban parks across the country, Dowie said.

The legislature will debate the second reading of Bill 193 on May 29.