Each summer at West Coast brings a new cohort of law students from across the country, eager to learn and gain experience in environmental and Indigenous law.
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.
Cooperative actions to explore and protect the deep sea
Perhaps the best-known examples of cooperative marine governance agreements in Canada are in Haida territories on the north Pacific coast, where the exciting deep sea Northeast Pacific Seamounts Expedition just concluded.
The Tsilhqot’in National Government (TNG) is back in court fighting to protect its lands and waters – Teztan Biny (Fish Lake), Yanah Biny (Little Fish Lake), and Nabas (the surrounding area) – from Taseko’s mining activities.
In 1997, facing mounting health-care costs from cigarette-related death and illness, B.C. did something unexpected. It became the first Canadian province to enact a Tobacco Damages Recovery Act, setting the rules for lawsuits against Big Tobacco to recover health-care dollars. Instead of continuing to pass on cigarette-related, health-care costs to taxpayers, the provincial government took action to hold international tobacco companies accountable.
It has been a few weeks since the Canadian government’s stunning announcement that it would buy the embattled Trans Mountain pipeline and expansion project from Kinder Morgan for C$4.5 billion.
We are St’át’imc. We speak St’át’imcets (also referred to as Ucwalmícwts or the language of the people). Created by the Transformers, our home is situated at an intersection of deep gorges in the lee of the Northwest Coast Mountains, now referred to as British Columbia.
On a long weekend trip, my family drove through Merritt, one of the communities hit by recent flooding in BC.
Kinder Morgan’s self-imposed May 31 deadline to achieve political certainty for building the Trans Mountain project is rapidly approaching.
In principle, a new BC statute that deals with climate change accountability sounds like a good thing.
Kinder Morgan has set a May 31 deadline to get political certainty. What can the federal government do to achieve this? And will it alleviate the host of legal, financial, reputational and practical risks facing the project?