By John DeFore

In what is said to be the “largest conservation commitment in Canadian history,” Ontario has set aside an area of forest that is almost the size of the United Kingdom.

On Monday, the province’s Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that, as part of its Far North Planning initiative, it would “permanently protect” an area of at least 225,000 square kilometers (around 86,873 square miles) in Ontario’s Northern Boreal region, which is home to 24,000 people and, according to the government, absorbs about 12.5 million tons of CO2 each year. The protected area is more than half of the Northern Boreal Region.

The plan, which is to be finalized by the Spring of 2009, will not ban commercial exploitation outright. Around half of the land will be off limits to industry; for the other half, as McGuinty put it, “new forestry or the opening of new mines … would require community land-use plans supported by local aboriginal communities.” Ontario will work with these local native communities, none of which currently have their own planning departments, to construct sustainable plans that allow them to benefit directly from any development that is allowed. The scheme will involve changes to a mining act that has, according to this report in Ontario’s newspaper The Star, pitted aboriginal groups (known as “First Nations”) against mining companies.

An official announcement called the region in question “one of the last truly wild spaces on the planet,” noting that “it is home to over 200 sensitive species of animals — such as polar bears, wolverines, and caribou — many of which are threatened or endangered.” Last year, a group of 1,500 scientists urged official protection of the region’s ecosystem.

“For many Ontarians,” McGuinty admitted, “the Far North is out of sight and maybe even out of mind. But it’s a very important part of who we are.”

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