Ontario maples at risk, says environmental watchdog

Ontario may need to start importing its syrup if it doesn't step up to save its maple trees, the province's environmental watchdog warned yesterday.

As the Canadian Press reports, environmental commissioner Gord Miller said the provincial government needs to generate a new plan to deal with the serious threats facing its biodiversity — or risk the loss of many native species.

"We could lose sugar maple trees from southern Ontario," Miller said, after the agency's latest report was released. "We could lose black spruce in northern Ontario. We already have a major crisis in our fisheries in the Great Lakes. These are real — real problems.

Miller did not mince words when he called out the Liberals for failing to produce an updated plan to its 2005 biodiversity strategy.

"Threats to biodiversity have already taken their toll on the province and the problems it faces are troubling," he said.

The government can't avoid its obligation to respond to an urgent crisis. But the province is "ill prepared" to meet the challenge, Miller added.

He also criticized the federal government for withdrawing from the Kyoto climate treaty in December, saying Canada was starting to develop a poor reputation amongst environmentalists.

In Ontario, however, Miller outlined a number of examples that have caused his agency specific concern.

Certain fruit crops and alfalfa sprouts, he said, will begin to fail if the wild pollinators that help sustain them disappear.

And by the end of the century, climate change may wipe out northern Ontario's spruce tree population.

"It's going to get too warm and too dry to support black spruce in the areas where it's growing right now — that's a climate change consequence," he said, adding the forestry industry that depends on those trees will find itself in big trouble as a result.

Ontario's ash and maple trees could also be heading the way of the elm, a species that disappeared in the province back in the 1960s.

A combination of climate change and an invasion of Asian long horned beetles from New York state has rendered the province's maples increasingly vulnerable.

Miller urged Ontarians to consider the long-term repercussions of such a scenario.

"If we lose our maple trees…Is that the Ontario we want to live in?" he asked.