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

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.

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.

Seawater temperatures rise. Ocean pollution intensifies. New pollution sources multiply. Underwater noise escalates. Plastics accumulate in the deep seas and on beaches everywhere. Coastal development sprawls. Overfishing is rampant. New ocean uses proliferate.

Offshore oil and gas activity – Tales from three coasts

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.

Last month, we wrote about actions you could take to cut plastic pollution in BC.

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.

BC’s Skeena watershed is a spectacular salmon breeding ground: the river and estuary are wild, undammed, and full not only of salmon but of herring, eulachon and waterfowl.