A Fence Job Damaged Rare Winnipeg Prairie. Which Policy Pays to Restore It?

In August, a contractor hired to move a chain-link fence at Amazon's delivery station on Regent Avenue in Winnipeg took equipment into Rotary Prairie Nature Park, cut swaths of native grass and shrubs, and dumped the material across the preserve. The park is about eight hectares of never-ploughed wet tallgrass prairie, a habitat with less than one per cent of its original extent left. Amazon has said it will contribute to the park's restoration, and the City of Winnipeg is investigating the ecological damage.

Nothing spilled and nothing burned. The loss is still real: physical damage to someone else's land, measured by what it costs to rebuild an ecosystem, caused by a contractor doing routine site work. Canadian contractors work beside parks, wetlands and natural areas every construction season, and few of their insurance programs were written with this claim in mind.

What happened at Rotary Prairie

Rotary Prairie sits at Regent Avenue West and Bradley Street in the Transcona industrial park, hemmed in by warehouses, car dealerships and busy roads. The City designated it a nature heritage site in 1992 and its naturalist services branch rates it Grade A. The Transcona Rotary Club stewards the site, and City surveys have recorded 142 plant species there since 1993, including gentians, mountain sneezeweed and whorled milkweed.

According to reporting by The Narwhal and CBC, the contractor moved a section of fence about two metres into the park so snow and ice could be cleared more safely from the parking lot this winter. Crews cut large areas of prairie and dumped the material far from the fence line, pulled the wooden boundary posts and left deep holes, drove a skid steer through the grass, and left a plastic pipe from the facility running across the site. Amazon told CBC the contractor did not follow correct procedures for working beside protected public land and that it is reviewing its oversight of the contractor and its own internal procedures. No dollar figure has been disclosed.

Restoration is a multi-year cost. Retired Manitoba ecologist John Morgan told The Narwhal that non-native species can take over disturbed prairie within one to two years, and that the site needs native seed in the first few months followed by a long-term weed control plan. That is a budget for seed, labour, monitoring and repeat treatment, on a site that has sat disturbed since August.

How a habitat claim reaches a contractor

Amazon can absorb this cost to protect its name. Most contractors' clients are smaller, and most contractors do not have a global parent willing to write the cheque. Here is how the same facts play out on an ordinary account.

Scenario. A property manager hires a grounds and snow-clearing contractor to push back a fence line behind a distribution warehouse to make room for snow storage. The neighbouring parcel is a municipal natural area on heavy clay that holds surface water. The crew clears the strip, tracks equipment across native grass, and stacks plowed snow from the salted lot along the new fence all winter. In spring, the meltwater pools on the prairie side.

Mechanism. The municipality documents crushed vegetation in the fall and, the next summer, a band of dead native plants and salt-tolerant weeds downslope of the snow pile. Its claim has two parts: repairing the physical damage, and remediating chloride-impacted soil followed by several years of invasive species control and monitoring. Environment and Climate Change Canada's assessment of road salts found that large releases harm plants, soil organisms and aquatic ecosystems, and that nearly all of the chloride eventually reaches surface water through runoff or groundwater. The property owner tenders the whole claim to the contractor under the indemnity in the snow contract.

Outcome. The contractor's CGL insurer looks at the physical damage and points to the exclusion for property damage to that particular part of real property on which the insured was performing operations. The fence strip is exactly where the crew was working. It looks at the chloride damage and applies the pollution exclusion, since salt-laden meltwater is a discharge of a contaminant. Two exclusions, two halves of the claim, and the contractor carries both.

Where contractor programs fall short

The first problem is valuation. In British Columbia v. Canadian Forest Products (2004 SCC 38), arising from a 1992 fire that damaged 1,491 hectares of Crown forest, the Supreme Court of Canada said there is no legal barrier to the Crown seeking compensation for environmental damage in a proper case, provided the claim rests on a coherent theory of damages and real evidence. The Crown's environmental claim failed on its record, but the door stayed open. A municipality or land trust making a habitat claim will price it on the cost of restoring the ecosystem, not on the market value of an eight-hectare strip in an industrial park. Limits and sublimits have to be measured against that number.

The second problem is the seam between policies. Habitat damage at the work area runs into the CGL's own-work and particular-part exclusions, and anything chemical (de-icer, fuel from a ruptured hydraulic line, herbicide overspray, sediment from an unprotected stockpile) runs into the pollution exclusion. A Contractors Pollution Liability (CPL) policy picks up the pollution half when its definitions are broad enough. Many CPL forms define cleanup costs around soil, surface water and groundwater remediation, with less clarity on reseeding native vegetation, invasive species control or long-term ecological monitoring.

Our view at TerrAssure is that this claim type will become more common as development pushes into edge sites and as municipalities, conservation groups and Indigenous nations get better at documenting and pricing ecological loss. Underwriters will start asking which jobs sit next to protected land and what the contractor does before equipment moves. Contractors who can show a staked boundary, pre-job photos and a snow storage plan are the ones who get clean terms and a policy that responds.

What brokers should do now

• Landscaping, fencing and snow-clearing contractors: ask which sites border parks, wetlands, ravines or natural heritage land, and where the snow goes. Pull the CGL wording and read the particular-part and pollution exclusions side by side.
• Contractors who already carry CPL: check whether cleanup costs include restoration of natural resources and native vegetation, and whether de-icing materials or chlorides are carved out anywhere in the form.
• Property managers and warehouse owners beside natural areas: review the indemnity and insurance clauses in grounds and snow contracts. Require the contractor to carry CPL and name the owner as additional insured.
• Industrial owners whose runoff drains onto neighbouring land: look at a Site Pollution Liability (SPL) policy for off-site migration from their own snow storage, stockpiles and stormwater outfalls.
• Civil and site-prep contractors on greenfield or edge sites: make pre-job documentation part of the submission. Photos, boundary staking and any vegetation or species survey become the evidence in both the claim and the underwriting file.

Habitat damage claims are still uncommon enough that most contractor programs have never been tested against one. If you place contractors or property owners who work beside protected land, send us the account and we will show you where the CGL stops and the pollution coverage has to start. Talk to TerrAssure underwriting.

Sources

• The Narwhal: Amazon says it will pay for damage to a rare tallgrass prairie (October 6, 2026)
• CBC News: Amazon says it's reviewing oversight after contractor damages Winnipeg preserve
• City of Winnipeg Naturalist Services: Rotary Prairie natural area report
• Environment and Climate Change Canada: Road salts, frequently asked questions
• Environment and Climate Change Canada: Code of Practice for the Environmental Management of Road Salts
• British Columbia v. Canadian Forest Products Ltd., 2004 SCC 38 (InforMEA case summary)