Ontario's former commissioner for the environment had plenty to say about her last job, climate change, and other topics Monday night.
Dr. Dianne Saxe, a world-renowned environmental lawyer who served for over three years as Ontario's non-partisan Commissioner for the Environment, had some critical words for the current provincial government during a talk at the University of Windsor's Alumni Auditorium. About 50 people attended the address as part of the Women of Valour Series, a joint effort by the University and the Windsor Jewish Community Centre. The address was part of a two-day itinerary for Saxe in Windsor-Essex, during which she met with law students and the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. She was scheduled to meet with the Essex Region Conservation Authority (ERCA) on Tuesday.
The daughter of prominent Toronto chief coroner and MPP Morton Schulman and neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe, Dr. Saxe took attendees through an overview of her career as an environmental lawyer, first with the provincial government and later in private practice. She paid particularly close attention to her work as environmental commissioner, to which she was appointed in 2015 by then-premier Kathleen Wynne.
"Once I started to understand the science and what's happening with all the policy, I just felt a compulsion to start talking to people," said Saxe. "We had lots of public interest in our work, which was amazing because when I was appointed, most people in Ontario didn't know we had an environmental commission, didn't know we had an Environmental Bill of Rights... and that was after 25 years."
Saxe was blunt when she described how things ended when Premier Doug Ford cut the commission in the fall of 2018, and split its duties between the Auditor General and the Ministry of the Environment as a cost-saving move.
"I was fired... Immediately after the election, even before Mr. Ford's government was sworn in, they started breaking things," said Saxe, adding that the government's decision to combine health units and conservation authorities contributed to the problem.
Climate change mitigation and people with expertise in climatology or the environment have also been hit with cuts, she said.
Saxe also discussed a subject that has hit people in southwestern Ontario, flooding. Producing a map of the province's wetland percentage, the southwestern portion was almost overwhelmingly in the red, with 20 per cent or less wetland territory, which Saxe said is crucial to controlling flooding.
Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent and London-Middlesex fell under this characterization, which is well-below Environment Canada's threshold of 10 per cent wetlands for healthy watersheds.
Saxe now works as what she called a "climate activist". Her positions on a variety of issues can be seen on her official website.
Dr Dianne Saxe shows a map of where the biggest wetlands in southern Ontario are. Most of the southwest has less than 20 per cent wetlands, University of Windsor, October 28, 2019. Photo by Mark Brown/Blackburn News.