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

At the end of May, as a summer law student at West Coast Environmental Law, I attended Federal Court as an observer at the hearing where the Communities and Coal Society and Voters Taking Action on Climate Change called into question the legality of the Vancouver Fraser

President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement is disappointing, outrageous and immoral. And it should surprise no one. 

Twenty-five years after Canada proposed the idea of World Oceans Day to the United Nations, people around the world are still celebrating on June 8. It's also a time to reflect.

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 

British Columbia has over 27,000 kilometres of coastline, and more than 170 cities, towns and villages along the coast, with around 75% of our population living in the Lower Mainland and southern Vancouve

On May 12, 2017, the federal government introduced Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, for first reading in Parliament.

 

 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?