Each summer at West Coast brings a new cohort of law students from across the country, eager to learn and gain experience in environmental and Indigenous law.
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.
In 1997, facing mounting health-care costs from cigarette-related death and illness, B.C. did something unexpected. It became the first Canadian province to enact a Tobacco Damages Recovery Act, setting the rules for lawsuits against Big Tobacco to recover health-care dollars. Instead of continuing to pass on cigarette-related, health-care costs to taxpayers, the provincial government took action to hold international tobacco companies accountable.
It has been a few weeks since the Canadian government’s stunning announcement that it would buy the embattled Trans Mountain pipeline and expansion project from Kinder Morgan for C$4.5 billion.
On a long weekend trip, my family drove through Merritt, one of the communities hit by recent flooding in BC.
Kinder Morgan’s self-imposed May 31 deadline to achieve political certainty for building the Trans Mountain project is rapidly approaching.
In principle, a new BC statute that deals with climate change accountability sounds like a good thing.
Kinder Morgan has set a May 31 deadline to get political certainty. What can the federal government do to achieve this? And will it alleviate the host of legal, financial, reputational and practical risks facing the project?
We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make sure that our waters and coast are protected from oil spills – not just from Kinder Morgan’s pipeline and tankers, but from any source for the future – through the modernization of our oil spill regulations in BC.
At a workshop held in Delaware this month, participants played a “Game of Floods” to learn in an interactive way about the risks that sea level rise poses to their community.
Some years ago I was discussing the lack of Canadian action on climate change with a young man who confided that he was suffering from Lyme disease, which he had contracted in a region that not long ago had been free from the disease. For me, that young man remains the face of the health impacts of climate change.