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

This Canada Day we are reflecting on the values that we need most to stand up in this moment and the history we need to learn from. Here is what some of our staff have to say.

Send a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc and the Senate, asking them to scrap Bill C-5 and send it back to the drawing board. Canadians deserve – and need – better.

We spoke with Katłıà Lafferty, RELAW’s Co-learning Manager and Rayanna Seymour-Hourie, Staff Lawyer and RELAW Program Lead, about what RELAW is up to as it approaches its ten-year anniversary.

US President Donald Trump shocked the international ocean community by issuing an Executive Order promoting deep seabed mining on the US Continental Shelf and the international seabed. In this blog post, we explain what’s at stake.

From addressing shellfish bed closures to Styrofoam pollution and more, here are five ways the BC Coastal Marine Strategy could make a real difference on the Coast.

As the country with the longest coastline in the world, defending our values, identity and economy requires safeguarding the ocean. We must ensure that the federal government meets its commitments to building laws and policies that will safeguard the long-term ecological health of the ocean.

Check out a list of ten questions you can ask to find out where your federal election candidates and their parties sit on key priorities for climate, nature and communities.

Take the pledge today and tell parties that this federal election, you are voting for a resilient, sustainable and fair Canada.

Know a young person who has made important contributions to environmental justice in BC, and/or who has a vision for how strong Canadian and/or Indigenous laws could contribute to ecological and community resilience in BC over the next 50 years. Nominate them to be recognized as a Young Changemaker for Environmental Justice!

If the rights and obligations declared within UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples cannot be enforced in court, are they anything more than words on a page? This issue is squarely on the table in the BC Court of Appeal proceedings in Gitxaała Nation v BC (Chief Gold Commissioner).