| Oct 20, 2011


For 16 years, a group of the 46 stewardship councils in Ontario (one per rural county) have been quietly going about their business, but that business is changing.

The councils were set up by the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) as a way of fostering environmental stewardship in rural Ontario.

In the case of the Frontenac Stewardship Council (FSC), efforts have been made to keep a representative council with membership from throughout the geographically diverse county, which has meant accommodating hour-long drives to and from North Frontenac as well as the ferry schedule to Wolfe Island.

“I think that at this point we have a very good council in terms of geographical representation and the different interests and backgrounds of its members,” said current Frontenac Stewardship Council Chair, Gord Rodgers (photo right), a resident of 14 Island Lake in South Frontenac.

The councils have access to a full time co-ordinator, who is an MNR employee, as well as $10,000 in seed money. The co-ordinator provides administrative support, some environmental expertise, and a lot of information about funding sources that the stewardship council can tap into to fund projects.

The council is at arm’s length from the government and has no regulatory function in the county.

“On the contrary, all we do is give money away to people who are interested in doing stewardship projects on their own properties. We only come to see people when they want us to come,” said Rodgers.

Some ongoing projects the Frontenac Stewardship Council has been involved with include tree planting on various properties, helping landowners develop stewardship plans for their properties, and the Big Sandy Bay restoration project on Wolfe Island.

The council also sponsors workshops and talks, such as popular fisher and wolf/coyote talks, as well as a loon day in Sharbot Lake a few summers ago.

Working with neighbouring councils, particularly the Lennox and Addington Council, FSC has been involved with projects such as the Butternut Recovery Project.

About a year ago, it started to become clear that the MNR, prompted at least in part by events such as the E-Health scandal, was uncomfortable with the way the stewardship councils are structured.

At the Eastern Zone conference (an annual meeting where council representatives from Peterborough to the west and the Quebec border to the east meet with each other, their co-ordinators and MNR staff) in the fall of 2010, the MNR’s concerns were first broached.

“They made it clear that they had decided the rules need to change about how funding was allocated to organisations that are outside of government,” recalls Gord Rodgers. “They wanted to see agencies such as ours, which are outside of government, become incorporated”.

As incorporated bodies, stewardship council members, who currently have no legal responsibility for the money that councils allocate, would become directors of not-for-profit corporations. As directors, they would take on legal and financial liability for their decisions, which would make the government happy.

“One thing that arises from this is that a council such as ours will need to purchase our own insurance, which will eat into the $10,000 we receive each year from the ministry,” said Rodgers.

Late in the spring of this year, another shoe dropped. The councils found out that as MNR employees, stewardship council co-ordinators will be limited in the kinds of work they can do for the independently incorporated stewardship councils.

“We are not entirely sure what this means, but for one thing, I gather that if a council such as ours wants to hire someone to work on a project, as we did when we produced the ‘Naturally Rich Frontenacs’ booklet last year, the co-ordinator will not be able to supervise that person. Bookkeeping and other functions that the co-ordinator offers might be cut as well. With the limited resources we have, we will be looking at increasing costs or asking our own members to do volunteer labour on a day-to-day basis, which is not what any of us signed up for, ” said Gord Rodgers.

There is also an underlying concern that once co-ordinators are freed up from some of their stewardship council responsibilities, their time will be taken up more and more by different responsibilities in a ministry that has been facing funding cuts in recent years.

“We are also concerned that the way this has been dealt with has been far less than completely open,” said Rodgers.

But that is about to change, he is hoping.

When he expressed concerns to the ministry about what was going on, Gord Rodgers, along with the council chair from Wellington County, was invited to meet with an MNR Assistant Deputy Minister in Toronto.

“He listened very well to our concerns,” said Rodgers. “Even though I have no idea what will come of it, I felt it was useful that we had a chance to put our issues on the table.”

Rodgers is hoping for some real indication of how the stewardship councils will be structured when the 2011 Eastern Zone conference takes place in Kingston at the end of November, when a chunk of time has been set aside for the ‘new business model’ to be discussed. A number of senior officials from the ministry have been invited to that meeting.

“We hope we can come up with something that works so we can carry on working with property owners in Frontenac County on voluntary stewardship projects,” said Rodgers.

 

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