ERO-019-7891: New regulation to focus municipal environmental assessment

By Linda Heron on Thursday, January 29th, 2026

Posted in MCEA, ORA Submissions, Regulatory, Environmental Registry, River Concerns, Rivers at Risk, Municipal

Allan’s Dam & Allan’s Dam Bridge, Guelph, Speed River.

Ontario does not need faster approvals at the expense of environmental protection, public accountability, and long-term resilience. The MCEA, while imperfect, remains a defensible and improvable planning framework. The proposed MPAP represents a significant regression—one that would set environmental governance, public participation, and infrastructure accountability back by decades.

ORA urges the Ministry to abandon this proposal and work collaboratively to strengthen, rather than dismantle, Ontario’s environmental assessment system.

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Section 16 Order Request: Allan’s Dam, Spillway and Sluiceway, City of Guelph, Speed River

By Linda Heron on Friday, November 28th, 2025

Posted in MCEA, Allan's Dam, Dam Removals, ORA Submissions, Aquatic Life, Dam Removal, Climate Change, Removal, Dams, River Concerns, Rivers at Risk, Studies & Reports, Speed River, Planning Act

Infrasture stacked on top of and surrounding Allans Dam and Spillway.

The handling and outcome of the Macdonell and Allan’s Structures MCEA constitute a serious procedural failure that infringes on the constitutionally protected Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Throughout the five-year MCEA process, the City withheld essential information—including the dam’s true age (155 years), the absence of any structural or subsurface assessment, the deteriorated condition of the spillway, and the 2018 OSIM recommendation for a LRIA-compliant Dam Safety Review. None of this was disclosed to Indigenous rights holders, despite the project’s direct implications for the Speed River, its fish, habitat, water quality, and flood risk.

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Speed River: Macdonell and Allan’s Structures Municipal Class Environmental Assessment

By Linda Heron on Tuesday, October 28th, 2025

Posted in Allan's Dam, MCEA, Dam Removals, ORA Submissions, Dam Removal, Speed River, Lakes & Rivers Improvement Act, Municipal

Allan’s Dam & Allan’s Dam Bridge, Guelph, Speed River.

Our own research revealed that Allan’s Dam is a legacy mill dam, originally constructed in the 1830s to power Allan’s Mill—one of Guelph’s founding industrial sites. Sometime later, the structure was adapted for hydroelectric generation, likely in the early to mid-20th century. It is our understanding that this facility has not generated electricity for several decades and now functions only as an aging dam, concrete spillway and sluiceway, impounding a shallow headpond on the Speed River. It appears that this infrastructure no longer serves any useful purpose while continuing to fragment habitat, degrade water quality, and emit copious amounts of carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

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