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

West Coast is excited to launch the Revitalizing Indigenous Law for Land, Air, and Water (RELAW) project in partnership with the

Last month at the invitation of Professor Val Waboose and the Windsor Law Faculty, I traveled with Anishinaabe scholars John Borrows and Heidi Stark to Walpole Island First Nation in Ontario to assist with, and learn from, a four-day Anishinaabe law camp.  The camp was organi

The Great Bear Sea is the ocean alongside the Great Bear Rainforest. A photo essay in Maclean’s magazine by renowned wilderness photographer Ian McAllister showcases its sublime marine beauty.

Canadians love parks and wilderness. Environment Minister Catherine McKenna recently said the most popular item in the federal budget was free admission for Canadians to all national parks in 2017, to mark Canada’s 150th birthday. 

In February I attended a Moose Management Summit in Treaty 8 territory at Fort St. John in northeastern BC. The summit was attended by over 100 trappers, hunters, Elders, Chiefs and Councillors, and environmental monitors representing Prophet River, Doig River, Blueberry River, West Moberly, Saulteau, Fort Nelson, and CASCA First Nations.

On April 4, 2016 the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs filed an amended Notice of Civil Claim in the BC Supreme Court seeking judicial recognition of their title to 6,200 square kilometres of the mid-Nass River and Kitwanga River watersheds in northwestern British Columbia.

The headlines were enough to make you wonder if you’d stepped into an alternate universe: a mining corporation suing the Crown for transferring land interests to First Nations without adequate consultation.

A crowd of over 300 community members, First Nations leaders, scientists, politicians, commercial and sport fishermen, and other concerned citizens gathered at the Salmon Nation Summit in Prince Rupert in January to talk wild salmon, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and ocean protection. The Summit ended with the signing of the

As Shakespeare wrote more than 400 years ago, “Action is eloquence.” And now we see some eloquent action, more than forty years since the fi