An Ontario court has struck down a move by the provincial government to kill the partly-built Nation Rise Wind Farm southeast of Ottawa, quashing Environment Minister Jeff Yurek’s decision last year to block the project over his concerns about endangered bats.

In its ruling, the Ontario Divisional Court said Mr. Yurek’s decision last December was “not reasonable,” and did not “meet the requirements of transparency, justification, and intelligibility.” Instead of returning the matter to the minister for reconsideration, the court took the unusual step of quashing it altogether and allowing construction on the wind farm to resume.

The ruling is a rebuke for the Progressive Conservative government of Doug Ford, which has sided with the rural opponents of wind and solar energy and spent at least $230-million to cancel 750 renewable energy projects approved by its Liberal predecessors. The government has said the projects were bad deals that paid artificially high rates for power, and that cancelling them saved consumers money in the long run.

The company behind the 29-turbine Nation Rise project, EDP Renewables Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Madrid-based EDP Renovaveis SA, took Mr. Yurek’s move to court last year. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a video hearing was held last month.

The project was initially approved by the previous Liberal government just before the 2018 election. A local group, Concerned Citizens of North Stormont, then challenged it before the province’s Environmental Review Tribunal, which approved it last year and concluded the project’s risk to bat populations was negligible. That group then asked Mr. Yurek for his last-ditch intervention, prompting him to overrule the ERT in December.

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