Bill 15, the Agricultural Land Commission Amendment Act 2019, currently being debated in the BC Legislature, has revealed deep-seated divisions between the governing BC NDP an
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.
There are a number of recent developments on the Trans Mountain file – from the reconsideration (“redo”) of the environmental assessment to unanswered questions about the federal government’s purchase price for the pipeline, and another (much quieter) NEB decision regarding rates for the existing Trans Mountain pipeline.
With children striking from school to protect their future, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that we have just over ten years left to keep climate change to 1.5 degrees, many of you have asked us at the Environmental Dispute Resolution Fund (EDRF) what we are doing to support climate litigation.
Canadians depend on the federal government to safeguard our families, our health and the environment from pollution, toxic contamination and other potential harms.
When you walk along an ocean shoreline, it’s a feast for the senses – waves crashing, birds swooping and calling, the taste of salt in the air, vividly coloured sea plants and creatures washing up in the swell of the waves. It’s easy to see that the coast is a place rich in life and biodiversity.
Increasingly, we are seeing stories of how the ocean is changing – both locally off the coast of BC, and on a global scale.
We are running a race to protect the environment, and the environmental rule of law could be the last hurdle.
For over 14,000 years, the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation has thrived on the abundance of the lands and waters in what is now known as the central coast of British Columbia.
In 1998, an internal Royal Dutch Shell memo predicted that as the impacts of climate change got worse, fossil-fuel companies might be sued in a class-action lawsuit “on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years …”
A growing number of communities, and lawyers, around the world are focusing their attention on global fossil fuel companies, arguing that they are legally liable for their products’ contribution to climate change and at least partially responsible for resulting climate-related costs.