Since the hunt closure, Ontario's black bears have increased by 16%. They number around 100,000 animals, and "nuisance complaints" by the hundreds are coming in to local officials throughout the province. These complaints are of bears that are breaking in to dwellings, menacing people, their pets and livestock, and doing damage to crops and bee yards. Further adverse impacts are to local businesses that once derived substantial benefit from the spring bear hunt - outfitters, guides, restaurants, motels, gas stations, grocery stores, all felt a significant loss when the hunt was banned. Much of their income had depended upon it. Some local hunt-dependent businesses failed.

Biologists note that more bears pose a threat to the stability of ungulate populations - deer, caribou, and moose are all affected because black bears prey on their calves and fawns, tracking the mothers by scent, and eating their young as soon as they are born. In addition, when bears are not kept at lower density levels, mature males eat immature bears and cubs, so the lack of a spring hunt (which was for male bears only) is ironically a cause of higher cub mortality. Those who clamored to ban the spring hunt had claimed that hunters shot mother bears, leaving orphaned cubs that would die. The opposite is the case - because the bears were hunted with the use of bait piles, the cubs would come in first, followed by the mothers, and in that event, the mothers would be spared, because the hunt rules were for males only. Now that 4,000 bears times the three years of no spring hunt (12,000 extra bears) are crowding the Ontario woods and suburbs, the pressure is building on both bears and man, and Ontario's politicians are about to learn that the "bear facts" of the matter are that their constituents are increasingly restless and angry and at risk.