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.
Even though water has been at the heart of logging conflicts in BC for many years, it is very rare that logging companies are actually made to pay financially when they harm watercourses. That’s why a rare out-of-court settlement announced this past week between logging giant, Tolko Industries, and Chilcotin Rancher, Randy Saugstad, is good new
Is BC’s environmental enforcement plummeting because conservation officers are stuck at their desks?
During the summer a news story on Global TV suggested one reason BC was quick to order a conservation officer to kill two bear cubs was because there were too few conservation officers to dea
When a government makes changes to a regulatory framework, it takes time – sometimes years – before its actual impacts can be known.
To Jacob Schroeder, editor, FactsCan.ca
cc. New Democratic Party Canada
Dear Folks at FactsCan.ca:
Re: Navigable Waters and Environmental Protection
The summer is quickly coming to a close, and the West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL) summer law student volunteers want to take this opportunity to thank our friends and mentors at WCEL for their support and guidance during the course of this amazing experience.
Beneath the earth lies groundwater, buried treasure in the form of aquifers. Manage it well, and the treasure will continue to nourish us for generations to come.
In May I spent time with colleagues from the Northwest Institute for Bioregional Research in Treaty 8 territory in northeastern BC listening to Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents talk about the cumulative effects of development projects on the health of their land and communities. Over the past few decades the region has experienced an
This week West Coast Environmental Law held a meeting “Go With the Flow: Meeting on Regulations for the BC Water Sustainability Act” with allies in the conservation world to discuss our Expectations for the next critical phase of the BC Water Sustainability Act – the development of the regulations that will make the Act effecti
When the BC government unveiled its new water pricing scheme, we wrote that while a major increase, the amounts being charged seemed very low.