Stakeholder Engagement: Developing New Administrative Monetary Penalties

Stakeholder Engagement Sessions

We are inviting you to participate in an engagement session that will support the development of new administrative monetary penalties for environmental contraventions.

The engagement session will be delivered online and offer an opportunity to provide direct input. The input received would then help inform the development of draft regulations and guidance document to support the implementation of the new administrative monetary penalties framework. These would be subject to further consultation, anticipated later this year.

Once registered for this engagement session, we will send you the engagement materials (i.e. discussion document and presentation), the webinar link and the event code for Slido (i.e. an interactive web-based question & answer and polling tool), which the ministry will be using to collect your input.

Please review the discussion document, including discussion questions, prior to the engagement session and prepare your responses.

Please let us know if you are unable to attend any of the scheduled engagement sessions. We will try to accommodate where possible.

Please send any questions you may have on these engagement sessions to Andre.Martin@ontario.ca.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Context

As committed to in our Made-in-Ontario Environment Plan, the Ontario government is taking actions to hold polluters accountable by strengthening our compliance and enforcement tools, to ensure compliance with Ontario’s environmental laws. As announced in fall of 2019, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks intends to expand its use of administrative monetary penalties for environmental contraventions. Administrative monetary penalties are financial penalties that can be issued to an organization or an individual for non-compliance with an act, regulation and any instrument under an act or regulation (e.g. permit, environmental compliance approval).

The expansion of administrative monetary penalties will help us better cover the ministry’s known compliance community of approximately 150,000 regulated entities, which includes large corporations, public entities (e.g. municipalities, crown corporations) as well as individuals and small businesses. The implementation of new administrative monetary penalties would build on the legislative changes made in 2019 under Bill 108 (the More Homes, More Choices Act, 2019) and Bill 132 (Better for People, Smarter for Business Act, 2019).