Conservationists are raising concerns as the City of Winnipeg considers walking back a development bylaw designed to help save birds from fatal window strikes, less than a year after the rules came into effect.
The City of Winnipeg says it will hold a public hearing Dec. 18 to consider “deleting” the bird-friendly window requirements for a mix of builds along major corridors and near malls.
“I’m kind of … shocked,” said Kevin Fraser, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Manitoba who focuses on bird migration and ecology.
“[It’s] a backwards move for birds.”
The city published a notice in the Winnipeg Free Press on Nov. 27 outlining proposed amendments to “Schedule AB Malls and Corridors zoning bylaw 200/2006.”
Changes on the table include dropping the bird-friendly window requirements.
A bird-safe window is one that is built or retrofitted with features like patterned films, decals, glazes or coatings to reduce strikes.
Environment and Climate Change Canada estimates between 16 million and 42 million migratory birds die in Canada per year due to window collisions.
A 2013 Canadian study found houses account for most of those deaths in total, because there are more houses overall than other buildings.
But Fraser says while those findings suggest each average residential home may be responsible for about two bird deaths each per year, every low- to mid-rise structure accounts for about five, and each tall building may cause 10 bird deaths annually.
Winnipeg city council began considering bird-friendly guidelines, developed by the Canadian Standards Association, four years ago. The association recommends glazes, decals or other measures be applied to 90 per cent of glass within the first 16 metres of a building, or to the height of adjacent mature tree canopies.
Last fall, council voted unanimously in favour of a motion from public works chair Coun. Janice Lukes to adopt a bird-friendly window development for select mall sites and corridors, excluding the city’s downtown.
Her office declined to comment for this story.
The malls and corridors zoning rules — referred to as a “planned development overlay” — that contain bird-safe requirements came into effect this January.
They were part of a series of bylaw tweaks made as part of the city’s past federal housing accelerator fund application to help fast-track approval and construction of new housing around malls and major roadway arteries.
The changes now being proposed come after feedback from industry suggesting “prescriptive” bird-friendly requirements presented barriers to development, “mainly due to challenges with sourcing compliant material and the costs,” according to the city.
A spokesperson said construction measures like window glazing that “promote bird-friendly design” are encouraged, but the city supports amendments to provide “flexibility so that these measures do not overly constrain or halt development.”
One industry voice providing feedback to the city is the Urban Development Institute of Manitoba, an association whose members include developers across commercial, industrial and residential sectors.
Executive director Lanny McInnes said some members with experience under Ottawa’s bird-friendly framework said coatings or treatments were “challenging to source” and claimed they didn’t “lead to the intended goal, which is obviously protecting birds.”
“But even more importantly, there’s other factors that impact the potential of bird strikes: window treatments, tree and foliage location around the building, use of internal and external lights, use of blinds, the paint colours of the interior of the unit, wind patterns, shadow, shade, time of day,” he said.
“All of those things have a … significant factor in terms of potential bird strikes above and beyond what coating is on an exterior window,” said McInnes, who is also president of the Manitoba Home Builders’ Association.
“There’s very little benefit, if any, and at the same time pretty significant additional costs and supply chain issues.”
But a former Canadian Wildlife Service biologist, two national conservation groups and the U of M’s Fraser all take a different view.
“Definitely they work to reduce mortality of birds striking windows,” said Ron Bazin, a retired species-at-risk biologist with the wildlife service.
There are “perils that [birds] have going to migrate,” he said, and “it seems a bit sad that we are impacting that.”
Autumn Jordan, the bird-friendly city organizer with Nature Canada, said window interventions are “one of the easiest ways that we can help to reverse the biodiversity crisis.”
Jordan pointed to a study from 2022 that demonstrated a decal product designed by Canadian company Feather Friendly may reduce collision risk by 95 per cent. It also found a patterned UV-reflective coating may reduce strikes by up to 71 per cent.
Nature Canada last week announced its latest slate of Canadian municipalities it has certified as bird-friendly, adding Calgary and more to a growing list that doesn’t contain any Manitoba communities.
“Grassland birds and aerial insectivores are the subgroups of birds that are declining most in Canada,” said Jordan.
“Winnipeg can really play a pivotal role in reducing one of those threats … being window collisions, by keeping their bird safe design standards.”
FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) Canada, a non-profit that works to raise awareness on the issue of bird-building collisions, pegs the average price of making a 40-storey multi-unit residential building bird-safe at one per cent of the construction costs.
Biologist Brendon Samuels, a research co-ordinator with FLAP, did his PhD work at Western University on bird window-strike solutions and related policy.
Bird-safe glazes utilize some of the same common manufacturing techniques as privacy window fittings and products applied to reduce heat gain through glass, said Samuels.
“It’s really important that we stick to the facts,” he said. “This does not delay timelines for construction, it does not meaningfully increase the cost of building housing.”
But there are “knowledge gaps” in the industry, which needs “regulatory certainty,” said Samuels.
“They also need education about what does it take to build to compliance with these standards.”
Though the federal government’s housing accelerator fund doesn’t include any conditions requiring bird-friendly designs, Samuels suggested it should, to be consistent with existing federal law.
Canada’s Migratory Bird Convention Act says it is illegal to kill migratory birds, “even from activities whose purpose is not to directly harm them,” like collisions with windows.
The Species at Risk Act includes similar protections for federally endangered or threatened species.
“I would hope that if the federal government is giving out money to municipalities to incentivize densification … what is constructed would be compliant with federal laws,” said Samuels.
“[It’s] smart policy, because you don’t want to be building things that are exposing building owners to liability when birds are piling up on the sidewalk outside of their structure.”
Fraser said when the city began reviewing bird-friendly design bylaw in 2021, “it seemed like a huge advance, something great for our city.”
“And then, probably before it’s really had a chance to make much of an impact on those birds hitting our buildings, it’s [potentially] being revoked.”
