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.

West Coast is proud to ally with the Stk’emlúpsemc te Secwépemc Nation (SSN) in their use of their own laws to determine the future of Pípsell (also known as Jacko Lake and environs), a sacred area threatened by the proposed open pit Ajax mine.

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

Kinder Morgan’s risky Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion just got a whole lot riskier, just as the company was taking steps to offload some of that risk onto Canadian 

“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?

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. 

Back in December we blogged that it was worth taking a moment to celebrate and reflect on the final rejection of the long-beleaguered Enbridge Northern Gateway project, even though it was announced simultaneously with the federal approval of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain proposal (an

In early April, the Environmental Dispute Resolution Fund team had an opportunity to visit some of our grantees in Secwepemc territory/Kamloops and participate in a declaration of solidarity and support for the Secwepemc decision to reject the proposed Ajax mine.

Alright Vancouver Island peeps. Listen up:

It’s been a while since we’ve updated you about Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline and tanker expansion project (KMX). A lot has happened in the past few months, so here’s a snapshot of where we’re at:

Political approvals