Environmental Law Alert Blog

Through our Environmental Law Alert blog, West Coast keeps you up to date on the latest developments and issues in environmental law. This includes:

  • proposed changes to the law that will weaken, or strengthen, environmental protection;
  • stories and situations where existing environmental laws are failing to protect the environment; and
  • emerging legal strategies that could be used to protect our environment.

If you have an environmental story that we should hear about, please e-mail Andrew Gage. We welcome your comments on any of the posts to this blog – but please keep in mind our policies on comments.

2020 Canadian Law Blog Awards Winner

Earlier this week the Quebec organization, Environnement Jeunesse (ENJEU), announced it was filing a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government for a failure to protect youth from climate change.

There has been a rash of complaints lately about efforts to strengthen and streamline federal decision-making on projects that affect the environment through

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting different results…"

In the last few sunny days of August, I took a trip to the Okanagan, which had been ablaze just a few days before with a series of major wildfires.

To be a responsible fiscal manager, you need a budget. And to be a responsible climate leader, you also need a budget – a carbon budget.

We narrowly lost the vote, but I felt surprisingly good about it.

7:29am, Thursday, August 30th, 2018:
We’re in a boardroom high above downtown Vancouver, not far from Robson Street where I’m told there used to be a great hunting path. I’m on the Federal Court of Appeal’s website, refreshing my web browser obsessively.

The Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) represents all BC’s local governments. In just a few weeks at its annual conference (September 10-14), local governments will vote on whether to demand that Chevron, Exxon and 18 other fossil fuel companies pay their fair share of climate change-related costs facing BC communities.

Canada claims to care about climate change, but the reality is that we have missed pretty much every climate promise that the federal government has set to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Why?

The government wants to hear your thoughts on its three recently released “Clean Growth” intentions papers, which set out next steps in addressing climate change through “Clean, Efficient Buildings,” “Clean Transportation” and “Clean Growth for Industry.”