OFA has provided comments to the Ministry of Natural Resources – Wildlife Section on proposed updates to the province’s black bear management approach.

OFA supports modernizing Ontario’s black bear management using a science-based, transparent, and adaptive framework, while emphasizing that agriculture operates within a shared landscape where human-bear conflict is a real and growing issue. OFA highlights increasing livestock, apiary, crop, and safety impacts on farms, noting that compensation programs often fail to capture true losses due to evidence requirements, leading to under-reporting and uncompensated damage. OFA stresses that rising bear habituation is reducing the effectiveness of traditional deterrents and calls for expanded research, tools, and supports for farmers. OFA supports population objective ranges but urges caution given data limitations and reliance on extrapolated estimates, particularly in fragmented agricultural landscapes. Special attention is recommended for the biologically isolated Saugeen (Bruce) Peninsula, where social carrying capacity may already be strained. Overall, OFA calls for black bear management that integrates agricultural realities, recognizes conflict as a legitimate management signal, addresses compensation gaps, and balances ecological sustainability with social and land-use pressures.