Typically weighing in at just one gram, the diminutive western chorus frog could prove a mighty impediment to Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s plans for Highway 413 if a federal impact assessment of the project holds sway.
Listed as threatened on Canada’s species-at-risk registry, clusters of the little amphibians cling to the remnants of their indigenous habitat in the northwestern reaches of the Greater Toronto Area—right along the 59-kilometre route of Ford’s proposed highway, reports CBC News.
“Building Highway 413 was one of Ford’s central promises in his 2022 re-election campaign,” CBC writes. His Progressive Conservatives won every seat in Peel and York, the two regions the highway would connect. But the project’s fate depends on whether the federal or provincial government controls its environmental assessment.
The Ford government insists the federal Impact Assessment Agency exceeded its jurisdictional authority by ordering an environmental review of the planned C$8-billion highway extension, priced at a mere $6 billion when Ottawa first announced the study in 2021. Immediately after a non-binding Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruling in mid-October that parts of the 2019 Impact Assessment Act encroaches on provincial jurisdiction over the environmental impacts of infrastructure and resource extraction projects, Ontario said it would pursue a binding legal judgement on the matter.
The SCC opinion arrived less than a year after Alberta’s top court ruled the IAA “unconstitutional.”
At a news conference in early December, Ontario Attorney General Doug Downey demanded Ottawa abandon its plan to conduct the impact assessment, adding that Queen’s Park “would continue its legal challenge of legislation that created the review process” in the first place, iPolitics reported at the time.
Accusing Ottawa of foot-dragging, Downey urged the feds to “get out of the way so that our government can get shovels in the ground on Highway 413.”
A spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault responded that the IAA had not received Highway 413’s project description—more than two years after the agency requested it as the mandatory first step towards initiating an assessment.
“So far, the only source of delay has been the Ontario government,” Guilbeault’s office said.
And while Guilbeault accepted the SCC opinion on federal overreach, he also said “it provides new guidance on the Impact Assessment Act, while explicitly affirming the right of the government of Canada to put in place impact assessment legislation and collaborate with provinces on environmental protection.” He added that Ottawa would be reviewing and “tightening” some of the language in the Act.
Back in the woodlands of Ontario (and Quebec), the western chorus frog isn’t doing well as a species. Habitat loss is a big factor in the amphibian’s decline in Ontario, Canadian Wildlife Federation wildlife biologist David Seburn told CBC.
The frogs are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss because they like to breed in so-called “vernal pools”—small ponds no more than 10 metres across, and typically no more than half a metre deep—that emerge in early spring and dry up within a few months. The frogs prefer these ephemeral habitats because they won’t contain the predators that like to feast on frog eggs and tadpoles, Seburn said.
But the very ephemerality of the ponds puts them at risk of being paved over.
“Many of these temporary ponds are not highly valued or thought of as being important habitats, so they’re often the first kind of habitat that gets drained and developed,” Seburn said.
Threatened species like these are usually found in small populations in geographically separated locations, said Ryan Norris, a professor in the department of integrative biology at the University of Guelph. Norris led a 2022 study commissioned by Environmental Defence Canada that identified 29 federally listed at-risk species along the proposed route for the 413.
“As those species have smaller populations and fewer populations, we increase the risk of extinction,” Norris explained.
Like all other wildlife species, the western chorus frog is an essential part of the biodiversity that sustains us all. “The more species we lose, the more our natural food webs here that we have in southern Ontario fall apart,” he warned.
Alongside threats to its preferred nursery habitats, Norris said the western chorus frog stands to be further endangered by highway water run-off, which could modify water chemistry and sedimentation levels in the wetlands where the amphibian spends much of its life.
