Ash borers a symptom of Ontario's gutless way of handling invasive species, commissioner warns

ottawacitizen.com
Oct. 26, 2016
By David Reevely

Ontario’s plants and animals are being pushed out by invasive species and the provincial government isn’t marshalling the fight against them, Environmental Commissioner Dianne Saxe warned Wednesday.

We’ve already failed to hold back emerald ash borers, tiny bugs that are in the middle of destroying about a quarter of all Ottawa’s trees, and Asian long-horned beetles could come for our maples next. Big wild boars are spreading to Eastern Ontario from the south, and a species of vine that wipes out food supplies for monarch butterflies has taken root throughout the Ottawa Valley.

By nature, invasive species don’t respect political boundaries, so it’s a problem that the Ontario government doesn’t co-ordinate efforts to fight them, Saxe wrote in her annual report on how well the provincial government defends the environment.

The theme of the report is that the government has powers to protect biodiversity but doesn’t use them. The province also needs to do a better job monitoring the decline of certain species - Ontario’s moose population is down 20 per cent in a decade for a host of reasons, including climate change, but we don’t have a clear understanding of the specifics, Saxe says. And it needs the nerve to let more northern forest fires burn if they’re only threatening timber and not people, because that’ll lead to healthier and more diverse forests, even if it costs forestry in the short term.

In Eastern Ontario, it’s the fight against invasive species that hits home.

Invasive species originate in other parts of the world but get here either as stowaways on imported products (emerald ash borers are thought to have arrived in Detroit in wooden crates or pallets from China) or as deliberate imports that get out of control. Because they don’t have natural predators in North America, they spread like crazy, often snuffing out native species and destroying delicate ecosystems.

“Most of the hard front-line work is still left to municipalities, conservation authorities and private landowners. They can’t do it all without provincial guidance, help, co-ordination or funding,” Saxe said.

The emerald ash borer is a perfect example. The bugs spread to southwestern Ontario from Michigan shortly after they were first detected there in 2002. The federal government cut down 150,000 ash trees to create a containment zone around the Windsor area - a lot of hard, expensive work, undertaken despite the fact that ash borers spread fairly slowly from tree to tree.

“Meanwhile, the emerald ash borer continued to spread rapidly in firewood and other untreated ash wood products, moved by humans along major transportation corridors. This pathway had not been prioritized,” Saxe’s report says. The infestation reached Ottawa in 2008, detected in a few trees around St. Laurent Boulevard and Ogilvie Road that summer.

Now the borers are everywhere and have cost the city and private landowners millions in cutting and replacing dying ash trees, and expensive vaccinations that have bought time for some particularly important ones. Our budget for the problem is up to $5.4 million a year, and this is a large city that can afford a proper effort. Many sparsely populated townships can’t hold up their end.

Possibly up next: Those Asian long-horned beetles, which gnaw through a lot more species of trees, including maples, birches, poplars and willows. We found some in trees on Toronto’s northern border in 2003 and it took four years of chopping and surveillance to wipe them out. Now more have been found near the Toronto airport, Saxe reports.

Then there’s “dog-strangling vine.” It’s not actually a threat to dogs but it chokes new growth on forest floors and fools monarch butterflies into laying eggs on it even though their caterpillars can’t eat it. Dog-strangling vine is all over Ontario and the government just got around to designating it a noxious weed.

And the wild boars. They’ve kicked around North America since Spanish explorers brought them, but they’ve recently spread north. They’re surviving year-round in Prescott-Russell, possibly originating with escapees from a game farm. Feral pigs “carry diseases that threaten other animals and people, destroy natural habitats by rooting, wallowing and grazing, and compete with native wildlife,” Saxe reports.

The legislature passed a law on invasive species last year that gives the natural-resources ministry new powers to combat them. The thing is, the government takes “a landscape approach” to invasive species, which seems not to require any action beyond general expressions of disapproval.

“The challenge of managing invasive species is an opportunity for the government to prove that taking a broader landscape approach to natural resource management does not mean passing the responsibility to other jurisdictions and bodies,” Saxe says. An opportunity the government has not taken.