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

For an hour or so on February 21st the most talked about issue on Twitter in Canada was an event about caribou, coal mining and Aboriginal Rights.  I’m guessing that that’s a first in the history of Twitter.  West Coast Environmental Law also had more hits on our website in a single day than we had ever had before – by quite a bit.

Nicole Peterson is a legal intern with West Coast Environmental Law who is participating in the Osgoode Aboriginal Clinical Intensive Program.  She writes:

Public participation in the BC government’s recent public consultations on cosmetic pesticides exceeded all expectations, with an all-time record 8,700 people telling the Legislative Committee what they

Recently the federal Ministers of the Environment and of Natural Resources have publicly confirmed that major changes ma

What began as a smear campaign against West Coast Environmental Law and other environmental groups has crossed a line with oil industry advocates EthicalOil.org and Ezra Levant (author of the book Ethical O

BC has laws governing mining roads, other laws governing forestry roads and still other laws governing oil and gas roads.  And historically there’s been no real coordination between the companies building these different roads.  As a result, BC has an estimated 400,000 to 550,000 kilometres of unpaved resource roads (the government its

December 1st marked a turning point in the effort to protect the Pacific coast and the watersheds that we all depend on from the threat of oil spills.

West Coast Environmental Law congratulates the Tsilhqot’in First Nation on its most recent court win in its efforts to protect Teztan Biny (Fish Lake) from the development of Taseko’s Prosperity (now called “New Prosperity”) mine.  Last week lawyers for the Tsilhqot’in and Taseko tangled in court, with the Tsilhqot’in coming away with the m

In preparing a presentation about the collapse of the enforcement of environmental laws in British Columbia over the past decade, I noticed something interesting: violators of the Wildlife Act – primarily hunters and fishers - are almost 4 times as likely to be convicted as violators of the Environmental Management Act – who ar