How a tiny frog could halt plans for a bridge across the Ottawa River at Kettle Island
The western chorus frog — a greenish-brown swamp dweller about 2.5 centimetres long and weighing just one gram — is classified as threatened in parts of Ontario and Quebec.
Randy Boswell, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: Sep 29, 2020 • Last Updated 1 hour ago • 5 minute read
With a major political battle looming in Ottawa-Gatineau over a proposed sixth interprovincial bridge, a tiny frog living in fragile habitats on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River is poised to leap into the fray.
The western chorus frog — a greenish-brown swamp dweller about 2.5 centimetres long and weighing just one gram — is classified as threatened in parts of Ontario and Quebec. The male’s “creaking” mating call, like a thumbnail run along the teeth of a comb, is the sound of spring in some parts of the country.
But the destruction of the petite tree frog’s feeding and breeding grounds in the Great Lakes region and St. Lawrence River watershed — including Ottawa Valley wetlands with semi-submerged trees and roots — has left the species vulnerable to extirpation and environmentalists highly protective of all remaining habitats.
Among those is a marshy area in Gatineau along the busy north-south artery Montée Paiement — within the development corridor of a proposed Kettle Island Bridge over the Ottawa River. The planned route across the island would connect Hwys. 417 and 174 in Ontario to Hwy. 50 in Quebec via Ottawa’s Aviation Parkway and Gatineau’s Montée Paiement, with both connector roads upgraded to accommodate the increased traffic they’d be handling.
But the frog’s presence complicates matters on the Quebec side — and there’s a precedent pointing to potential trouble.
In 2016, then-federal environment minister Catherine McKenna issued a controversial protection order under Canada’s species-at-risk law that halted part of a massive Montreal-area real estate development to safeguard western chorus frog nesting sites. The move angered not only the developer but also Quebec’s then-Liberal government, which condemned McKenna’s intervention as an unwarranted intrusion into provincial affairs.
But the Trudeau government’s action in the case was upheld by the Federal Court of Canada in a 2018 decision hailed by environmental groups as a landmark ruling for wildlife protection. And earlier this year, the Federal Court of Appeal denied a bid to overturn the 2018 court decision.
The Kettle Island corridor has been debated for decades in Ottawa-Gatineau, and is once again being examined by the National Capital Commission — along with two other possible east-end bridge routes — after the 2019 federal budget highlighted “the demonstrated need for an additional National Capital Region crossing” to divert heavy truck traffic from central Ottawa.
In June, the NCC dusted off a decade-old set of studies that had led to the agency’s 2013 recommendation to proceed with a bridge over Kettle Island. Public opposition at the time — especially among residents of Manor Park, Rockcliffe and other Ottawa communities near the Aviation Parkway approach to the proposed bridge — led the Ontario government to pull out of the project and the NCC to indefinitely shelve the idea.
The NCC’s June “refresh” report noted two significant changes in the past seven years in the proposed Kettle Island Bridge corridor: the identification of the frog habitat along Montée Paiement and the designation of Kettle Island itself as a Quebec nature reserve.
The revival of the bridge project has quickly rekindled the controversy that has surrounded it since the 1950s. Both Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson and Gatineau Mayor Maxime Pedneaud-Jobin have rejected the federal government’s assertion that a sixth bridge is needed, and have instead pushed to have available federal funding directed toward interprovincial mass transit and other initiatives.
But Gatineau Liberal MP Steven MacKinnon and McKenna — the Liberal MP for Ottawa Centre and now the federal infrastructure and communities minister — have both expressed strong support for a new bridge.
“People should be celebrating this,” McKenna said following the 2019 budget announcement. “It is a bit strange that we have heavy-duty trucks going through the centre of Ottawa. I think everyone would agree that’s sub-par … This is an opportunity to step back and have a holistic vision.”
The situation puts McKenna in a tricky position as both a vocal supporter of a new interprovincial bridge, and as the high-profile champion of western chorus frog habitat protection in the face of development pressures.
The NCC’s June study did not identify a preferred bridge route, but provided updates on a host of environmental, traffic and other factors that had led to the federal agency’s 2013 endorsement of the Kettle Island route over two other corridors farther to the east.
The two significant changes on the environmental front were noted in the report’s update on the proposed Kettle Island corridor. First, the uninhabited, 3.7-kilometre-long island over which the bridge would be built — owned almost entirely by the Nature Conservancy of Canada —was officially designated as a provincially protected natural area in late 2013.
And second, biologists who recently surveyed wildlife habitats for another development project in Gatineau identified western chorus frog habitat in the vicinity of Kettle Island along the bridge route connecting the major Ontario and Quebec highways.
The NCC-commissioned report stated that the island corridor “now presents new natural environment constraints as Kettle Island obtained status as a Nature Reserve under Quebec’s Natural Conservation Act and Western Chorus Frog habitat has been identified along Montée Paiement in Gatineau.”
The NCC report released in June wasn’t the only study conducted since the 2019 federal budget triggered the latest round of interprovincial bridge planning and squabbling.
A more comprehensive, 150-page, $1.4-million internal assessment prepared for Public Services and Procurement Canada — and obtained earlier this month by Radio-Canada — concluded that Kettle Island remains the preferred bridge option and that the crossing could be built for about $1.8 billion, $300 million less than either of the other two potential routes to the east at Lower Duck Island and McLaurin Bay.
In a statement provided to the Citizen, a PSPC spokesperson said the federal department “is still in the process of reviewing this (internal) assessment, and reviewing additional elements that have changed since 2011, including the approach to Indigenous consultations, environmental impacts, and transportation flows.”
Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy says it’s legally required to oppose the construction of a bridge across the “ecologically rich and sensitive” Kettle Island.
“We are bound by two agreements that prevent us from building infrastructure on the land,” said the conservancy’s Montreal-based spokesperson Elizabeth Sbaglia. The group’s 2008 acquisition of the island under the Canadian Ecological Gifts Program requires it “to ensure that no infrastructure, public or private, will be built or developed on the island to protect its natural characteristics for the long term,” she said.
And the nature reserve designation under Quebec’s Natural Heritage Conservation Act similarly prevents new infrastructure from being built on Kettle Island, Sbaglia added.
The conservancy acknowledged, however, that legal protections for the island can’t “definitively exclude Kettle Island as an option” for a new bridge route.
Caroline Gagné, the Nature Conservancy’s program director for Western Quebec, said that’s because governments “could decide to use expropriation measures … Some laws have a priority over others.”
But expropriating a portion of Kettle Island for a bridge abutment “would create a precedent for all nature reserves across the province,” Gagné warned, “and would send a message that the protection in perpetuity cannot be guaranteed.”
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/how-a-tin...across-the-ottawa-river-at-kettle-island
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