In July 2008, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced a world-leading commitment to conservation-focused land-use planning for Ontario's Great Boreal Forest, including protection for more than 50% of the area. To make this bold commitment a reality, we need a strong Boreal legislation that:

1. Creates a well-resourced joint Planning Board to allow First Nations and the Province to work together and share implementation of planning.

2. Details how Ontario will work in partnership with First Nations to determine the location, use and management of the 50% or more of the region that the Premier has committed to protect as conservation lands.

3. Sets out how community plans will be developed and integrated with regional objectives.

4. Describes how communities will realize long-term benefits from development and their role in management.

5. Provides a clear role for a Science Advisory Committee, including objectives for how it will inform land-use planning.

6. Sets clear rules for the development of roads, corridors and industrial activity outside of protected areas.

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• Canada’s boreal is home to one of the three largest intact forests remaining in the world.  Canada’s boreal region is part of a nearly continuous forest region that stretches around the entire globe. (See the maps page.)

• At approximately 50 million hectares, the boreal region within Ontario spans the northern part of the province, from the Manitoba border in the west to James Bay and the Quebec border in the east.  Ontario’s northern boreal forest joins with the intact forests in Manitoba and Quebec and together these form the heart of the largest intact forest region in North America.

• Ontario’s Great Boreal Forest, found north of approximately 50 degrees latitude, has never been open to industrial logging.  There are almost no all-season roads in the region and only two operating mines, making this a region where we still have the luxury of planning for the future of one of the world’s few remaining truly intact forests.

• Approximately 24,000 people live in remote Aboriginal communities situated on the lakes and rivers of far northern Ontario. Water courses serve as the highways of the region in summer while in winter ice-roads allow a few months of access by truck or car.

• The high concentration of lakes containing walleye and northern pike in the region has made it a top destination for fly-in sport fishing. The resource-based tourism industry is a major component of the northern Ontario economy. The total annual economic activity from resource-based tourism for all of northern Ontario is approximately $306 million with remote fly-in operations accounting for 25% of the tourism businesses in the region.

• Ontario’s Great Boreal Forest is a vital carbon sink. The forests and peatlands in the region store about 97 billion tonnes of carbon and absorb approximately 12.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

• Up to 85 percent of the region is composed of peatlands. The densest concentrations are around  Hudson  and James Bays.  These form the largest wetland in Canada and the third-largest in the world.  Such a huge expanse of peat occurs nowhere else in North America and in only a few places in the world. 
  
  
• The boreal forest is the single most important breeding ground for birds in Canada. It is estimated that 300 species and 2 billion individual birds breed in Ontario’s boreal forest before migrating south. As Ontario is at the heart of the nation's boreal forest, it is Ontario's songbird nursery.
  
  
• The Great Boreal Forest region is home to thousands of species of wildlife — including many that are sensitive including polar bears, wolverines and caribou
  
  
• The Boreal Forest is shaped by powerful natural forces, like fire, wind and insect outbreaks.  The result is a remarkably varied patchwork of habitats. Dense carpets of new growth mix with older stands of black spruce and fir laced with mazes of grey-green lichen-covered clearings. There are pockets of aspen and birch, jack pine ridges, expansive open mats of bright green and yellow muskeg, wavy-lined string bogs, beaver ponds, meadows, marshes and creeks, and rivers and lakes of every size and description.