I want to stress the pecu­liar ori­gins of how this emerged in Nia­gara and from it Ontario. The goal is to allow urban devel­op­ment on provin­cially sig­nif­i­cant wet­lands that are now pro­tected from it.

I wish to stress that I am not a dog­ma­tist opposed to finan­cial incen­tives, trad­ing mech­a­nisms etc. to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment. Dur­ing the NDP gov­ern­ment in Ontario there was a push for phos­pho­rous trad­ing to reduce pol­lu­tion, which was actu­ally taken up by one con­ser­va­tion author­ity, South Nation, between Ottawa and Mon­treal. In all the rest of the province, includ­ing Nia­gara it went nowhere. This is because it did not fit into the agen­das of the same sort of con­struc­tion inter­ests here that are push­ing bio­di­ver­sity off­set­ting. They cor­rectly under­stood that phos­pho­rous trad­ing would mean less money for expen­sive con­struc­tion activ­ity, such as sep­a­rat­ing storm and san­i­tary sew­ers, and wanted to hog the money for them­selves, and not let rural landown­ers ben­e­fit from mea­sures such as pay­ing for treed buffer strips.