The mayors of Brampton and Mississauga are urging the Ford government to exempt a Toronto-area conservation authority from a planned merger, claiming the changes would pose “significant and immediate risks” to three of the province’s largest cities.

Ontario confirmed this year that it would amalgamate 36 conservation authorities into just nine in an attempt to remove duplication, streamline the permitting processes and fast-track housing developments across the province.

The new structure will also see the creation of an Ontario-wide conservation authority to serve as an oversight body, which will help manage the 75 per cent drop in the number of conservation authorities.

But last week, the mayors of Brampton and Mississauga wrote to Environment Minister Todd McCarthy outlining their “strong opposition” to the plan.

In a joint letter, Patrick Brown and Carolyn Parrish called on the government to consider keeping the Credit Valley Conservation Authority as a stand-alone entity.

The authority, which was created in 1954, is set to be folded into the Western Lake Ontario Regional Conservation, along with the Halton, Hamilton and Niagara Peninsula conservation authorities. It’s move, the mayors argue, would upend the local system.

Get breaking National news

Get breaking Canada news delivered to your inbox as it happens so you won’t miss a trending story.

“This legislation poses significant and immediate risks to three of Ontario’s largest and most economically critical cities. The stability, safety, and efficiency of our local watershed management system are too important to jeopardize,” the mayors wrote in their letter.

“Any move that threatens to weaken or disrupt the high‑performing services our residents and businesses rely on demands our direct and urgent intervention.”

Brown and Parrish, along with the Region of Peel, argue that the Credit Valley Conservation Authority already exceeds provincial expectations on issuing housing permits — with a response time of 14 days compared to the provincial requirement of 90 days.

Any changes, they wrote, would “slow housing approvals, reduce certainty for builders, and result in fewer shovels in the ground.”

The warnings outlined in the mayor’s letter echo the concerns from the conservation authority’s board of directors, who said municipal planners and developers already have predictable timelines in the region and that any changes could seize up the gears.

“In the context of Ontario’s housing crisis, the last thing we should do is disrupt a system that is already helping get homes built,” said Michael Palleschi, the conservation board chair.

“Transitioning to a new regional bureaucracy would almost certainly slow approvals while staff, systems, and governance structures are reorganized.”

The government is currently targeting early 2027 to complete its amalgamation work, a timeline some have suggested is likely to be pushed back.

“I would suggest that February 2027, as being proposed, is very ambitious,” Tim Lanthier, the CAO of Grey Sauble Conservation Authority, previously told Global News. “It’s our understanding from the media statements that the province has a plan. We’ve yet to see this plan, though.”

Minister McCarthy has pledged that the amalgamation won’t lead to net job losses and insists it is necessary to deal with “fragmentation,” bring efficiency to leadership and standardization to the work conservation authorities do.

“We had a problem with fragmentation and inconsistency,” the minister said. “We identified the solution to that problem. We listened after initially proposing seven, and we’ve arrived at nine.”

The mayors of Brampton and Mississauga called on the government to “reconsider or pause” the proposed legislation “until full consultation with municipalities is completed.”

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

Two years after the Ford government launched its signature fare integration program, the eventual opening of the Hurontario LRT is driving a fresh push to expand the program to bring more standard fares and schedules.

As part of omnibus legislation tabled Monday, the Ministry of Transportation will begin working out how to harmonize transit fares in a variety of Toronto-area municipalities, as well as bring more uniformity to schedules.

“We’ve seen the success of one fare, which has been the integration, from an affordability perspective. We’ve seen over 72 million transfers,” Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said on Monday.

“We (want to create) a structure, between municipal transit agencies that are collaborating, working together, whether it be on schedules, whether it be on fares.”

The original policy was launched in February 2024 with a promise to eliminate the barriers for commuters switching between transit systems in and around Toronto.

It scrapped second fares for anyone travelling on any of Toronto’s or the GTA-905’s various transit agencies, charging customers a single fare and reimbursing transit agencies for the funds they would have collected.

The next stage will see the government begin consultations across Toronto and the surrounding area on how to get fares in line with one another. Schedule alignment will also be considered.

Get daily National news

Get daily Canada news delivered to your inbox so you’ll never miss the day’s top stories.

The government indicated to Global News that the new Hazel McCallion Line, set to run along Hurontario Street from Mississauga into Brampton, helped catalyze the next step.

The new light rail route will begin in Port Credit and eventually run all the way into downtown Brampton, crossing municipal boundaries served by two different transit systems.

Currently, Mississauga’s MiWay service charges people tapping a Presto card $3.50, while Brampton Transit costs $3.55. The cash fare in Mississauga is $4.50, compared to $4.75 in Brampton.

If the Hurontario Street LRT were currently operational, that reality would mean customers boarding it in Brampton could pay more than those in Mississauga — or the light rail route costing less than the bus in Brampton, if it only operated on MiWay’s fares.

Ahead of the route’s completion — the date of which is not currently public — the province asked Brampton and Mississauga to work to harmonize their fares so the line could serve both cities.

The two sides,  however, couldn’t organically come to an agreement. That, the government suggested, prompted them to ramp up its work to create uniformity for fares across the Toronto area under its OneFare program.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re getting on in Markham or say Mississauga or Brampton, York Region — we (should) have a structure between municipal transit agencies that are collaborating, working together, whether it be on schedules, whether it be on fares,” Sarkaria added.

The omnibus legislation will allow Ontario to write as-yet undecided regulations to bring uniformity to transit fares — and potentially schedules — around Toronto. It will apply to all cities currently involved in fare integration, as well as Hamilton and Halton Region.

The potential next stage, allowing transit services to operate across municipal boundaries, could be the most challenging. A web of complicated union agreements, where operators earn different salaries in different jurisdictions, stands in the way.

The Toronto Transit Commission’s chief strategy and customer officer, Josh Colle, said at a recent Toronto Region Board of Trade event that work is underway for further integration, but barriers remain.

“The collective agreements are our barrier and one we are working through,” he explained. “I think the positive take on that is this is only going to work if we bring everyone along, including the people who actually operate the buses, and so that’s something we’re working on.”

The government is yet to give a timeline for when it could introduce regulations to enable the next step — or how much its target standard fare would be — but said work on consultation will begin quickly.

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

The number of people and businesses receiving threats in Peel Region has been growing, but police hope help is finally on the way.

Last year alone, there were 476 reported cases — of which 190 targeted businesses — and that only reflects incidents where the victims have come forward.

“There are people that aren’t coming forward and are paying. There are people that aren’t able to pay and are still facing those threats, but still don’t come forward,” Peel Police Deputy Chief Nick Milinovich told Global News.

“There are people that do come forward and they don’t come forward until days after they receive the threat and experience the violence.”

On Thursday, the federal government said it was taking a major step toward tackling the situation by embedding financial crime experts within the Peel Regional Police.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced a suite of new initiatives he said will make it easier for police to “follow the money” and disrupt criminal networks.

Get daily National news

Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.

The government says Canada’s financial intelligence agency Fintrac will put new resources behind tackling extortion. As part of that effort, Fintrac agents will also join with local law enforcement on the ground to help quickly trace reports of extortion.

Fintrac will also share data with financial institutions to help them flag suspicious transactions.

Across the region, police have been dealing with an increasing number of extortion and brazen cases.

The allegations investigators are presented with generally begin with a WhatsApp message sent to a business, Milinovich said.

“In Ontario, you have extortions that are the result of two types of violence: you have extortions that are occurring because the people have been involved in some kind of criminal activity, and then in between you have extortions that are associated to families and business owners,” he explained.

In early January, for example, a shooting was reported at a business located in Caledon’s Perdue Court around 2:30 a.m. OPP said no injuries were reported, noting it was the same location as a similar shooting the month before.

“The OPP urges community members to remain vigilant and promptly report suspicious activity to police,” police said at the time.

Local police hope the introduction of financial experts into their operations will make it easier to trace extortion and harder to get away with.

“The reality is this type of crime is motivated by money,” Milinovich said. “Fintrac are the experts in the area of money. Currently, as it sits right now, it’s high-reward, low-risk. That needs to change. We need to reduce the reward that people gain from being involved in extortion. It’s a big deal for us.”

Champagne was asked in Mississauga whether any new money was being committed in Thursday’s announcement.

He didn’t answer directly and said he couldn’t share operational details without the risk of tipping law enforcement’s hand. But he didn’t rule out additional spending.

“My message to Fintrac is, if any additional resources are needed, we’ll be there,” Champagne said.

The aim for police in Peel Region now is to lean on their federal resources to try to make extortion less financially appealing.

“It’s the fear business,” Milinovich concluded.

— With files from The Canadian Press

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

After the COVID-19 pandemic,  ridership on Toronto’s buses, streetcars and subways struggled to rebound.

But it surged back in nearby cities.

Brampton, Mississauga and parts of Waterloo Region were among the suburbs that rapidly recovered from COVID-19, setting records for the number of passengers and struggling with overcrowding.

Then, the federal government put a cap on the number of international students who could study in Ontario. The move appears to be directly linked to suddenly plummeting ridership in those cities, which are now recording millions fewer rides.

“In 2024, federal policy changes reduced immigration inflows and began to affect ridership,” the City of Brampton wrote in a statement to Global News. “Demand slowed late in the year and declines continued into Spring and Summer 2025, resulting in a revenue shortfall.”

Mississauga, for example, saw its student ridership drop 24 per cent last year and its total number of riders fall by 10 per cent.

“A 10 per cent drop in ridership does seem significant,” Mississauga’s Miway transit director Maureen Cosyn Heath acknowledged. “Certainly, the policy change is an impact on that.”

Get daily National news

Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.

In Waterloo, Grand River Transit provided four million fewer rides in 2025 than it had the year before.

“Decreases in ridership were mainly due to reductions in the local student population,” a recent report from the agency explained.

The cap on international students was brought in by the federal government in January 2024 and then tightened. It’s been blamed by the Ontario government for financial struggles at provincial colleges as even overseas students who can get visas begin to stay away.

Cosyn Heath said the long-term impacts of the policy would mean Mississauga has to change how it plans its transit system, perhaps dropping or reducing its routes serving campuses or student housing.

“We’re aware that the changes on international students are going to have a permanent impact on us in the longer term,” she said. “So we revise our ridership projections, and then we pivot and shift to figuring out what new markets exist that we need to serve better.”

Brampton, too, said it would be “aligning service delivery with demand and long-term sustainability.”

Despite the short-term hit to transit ridership around Toronto, one transit expert believes it’s a bump in the road rather than an existential threat.

“Brampton was the transit success story of North America long before the international boom,” Jonathan English, principal at Infrastory Insights, told Global News.

“They experienced a 250 per cent ridership bump before international students arrived. Is it a significant drop? For sure. And will that have financial consequences? Definitely. But I think we need to keep it in perspective.”

In Mississauga, the transit agency is taking a pause to assess the impacts, but not scaling back. After increasing ridership hours, MiWay will freeze them for 2026 as it works out how to address a 10 per cent drop in travellers.

“You’re not going to see service cuts unilaterally across the system as a result of one pocket of our ridership,” Cosyn Heath said.

English said that’s the right approach, urging cities to ensure service improves to attract new riders who aren’t as reliant on transit as students might be.

“It’s hard to change routes before ridership data comes in. Now the ridership data has come in and there is an opportunity for the systems to respond — and they need to respond,” he said.

“Are some routes going to permanently or, for the foreseeable future, have less ridership? Absolutely… but overall the cities continue to grow, people continue to travel to work, to play, to school, so the key goal has to be here ot make sure we maintain a basic quality service level.”

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.