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

It's a beautiful morning and I'm walking in my small Gulf Island community with my wee grandson. Birds chirping, flowers blooming, wee grandson cooing. It's all open-hearted love and happiness as I push the baby stroller through the island's downtown area, sometimes pausing to play with the wee one's impossibly soft feet.

In 2013, after Christy Clark’s unexpected election win, we wrote a post about what environmental wins we might expect from her new government.

 

 Yawn.  Late last night, I watched the election results come in during a nail-biter of an election, and tried (eventually successfully) to get my 11-year old daughter – an ardent Green Party supporter – to go to sleep. 

“Dear Chevron – you may have noticed that I’ve been melting a little faster of late, because of fossil fuel pollution from your products (among others).  That’s a problem, because I’m the main source of water for hundreds of millions of people – not to mention all the other species that depend on me, too. What do you plan to do about it?

 

Today, April 22, we celebrate Earth Day, the day of action that started in 1970 and helped launch the environmental movement. 

Environment & Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna with EA Review Expert Panel Chair Johanne Gélinas (Photo: Anna Johnston).

In an earlier post we compared the BC Liberal and BC NDP Climate plans in advance of the upcoming election.  At the time the BC Green Party had not released its climate plan. 

The Liberal Party of Canada was elected in part on the basis of a promise to restore lost environmental protections – including reviewing the “elimination of the Navigable Waters Protection Act” in order to “restore lost protections and incorporate more modern safeguards.”  On March 23rd the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport

Revelations about the amount of corporate money coming to the BC Liberals have many people asking: what are these companies getting in return? It's important to recognize that large corporate donations may be aimed at achieving a more sympathetic regulatory environment – one in which a failure to comply with BC's environmental laws may not result in major consequences.

This column was originally published on Slaw – Canada's online legal magazine.