As anyone who has worked in environmental or social justice knows, sometimes change takes a very, very long time, somewhat like a glacier carving out a valley. Little, incremental changes take place that you don’t notice at the time, but that add up to earth-shattering differences in the long run. Sometimes, though, you can point to milestones, markers in time that help you distinguish when things took a turn.
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| Solar is Intergenerational: TWN Sacred Trust member Carleen Thomas with her parents Ernest and Dee George and granddaughters Lily, Miya and Jasmine. |
On Saturday, July 7 2012 the Tsleil-Waututh Nation and Squamish Nation signed onto the Save the Fraser Declaration.
On June 26, 2014 the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decision in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia marked a watershed moment in the long journey of First Nations peoples to achieve recognition of their inherent title and authority over their ancestral territories.
The thing that frustrated me most when watching the Prime Minister’s press conference earlier this week approving the Kinder Morgan and Line 3 pipelines is that he – or at least his government – knows that these pipelines undermine Canada’s climate goals and move us away from a sustainable future.
Treaty 8 First Nations have taken their struggle against the proposed Site C Hydroelectric Dam on the Peace River into the international arena by appealing to the United Nations to intervene against the BC government to protect their interests. The appeal was issued in New York last month at the 10th annual session of the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous I
Earlier this month TransCanada announced that it would be claiming compensation under the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. This is a significant moment in our collective transition from the world as it has been, to the world as it needs to be.
It’s been a busy year – with West Coast sounding the alarm on some major changes to BC’s laws and analyzing and commenting on other legal issues related to the future of our communities and planet. Thanks to the magic of Google Analytics we’re able to give you our 10 most-read posts of 2014.
Like many, I did not see Premier Christy Clark’s surprise majority win coming.
It is no secret that the environmental community, West Coast Environmental Law included, saw some of the other parties as offering stronger environmental platforms. UBC’s Professor George Hoberg has gone so far as to describe the election results as a “stunning setback for the environmental community.”
On September 24, 2015 the National Energy Board (NEB) did something remarkable. They stopped time. More precisely, they traveled back in time, to September 18, 2015, stopped time, then traveled back to the future, to January 8, 2016 to start it again. In the words of the Time Lord, Dr. Who, time is indeed “wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff?”
