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

Niché sur une route tranquille à l'extérieur de Port Alberni, dans la petite communauté de Beaver Creek sur l'île de Vancouver, se trouve un établissement unique, dirigé par des Autochtones. La mission de cet établissement est d'aider les personnes et les familles à guérir leurs traumatismes et leurs dépendances.

Tucked away on a quiet road outside of Port Alberni, in the small Vancouver Island community of Beaver Creek, lies a unique, Indigenous-led facility focused on helping individuals and families heal from trauma and addictions.

Soon, your Member of Parliament will debate whether to move forward with the National Strategy to Redress Environmental Racism Act (Bill C-230). This is a chance that Canada cannot afford to miss.

When the Canadian government pledged to make the country’s greenhouse gas emissions net zero by 2050, followed a year later by a similar pledge from BC’s government, it was widely interpreted as an ambitious climate target.

The Earth’s long-term average temperature has risen by a little more than 1°C since 1880, when reliable temperature records began.

Lately, my colleague Georgia Lloyd-Smith and I have been thinking a lot about the Site C dam.

When a mine has been denied approval not once, but twice by the federal government, roundly rejected by the Indigenous nation in whose territory it is proposed, when the company’s legal appeals have been unsuccessful, and its provincial approval is one week away from expiring, one might fairly conclude that the project is dead.

In a year marked by a pandemic, sweeping public health restrictions and major shifts in our everyday lives – as well as more local disasters which give us a taste of what climate change will bring – there are many lessons to be learned.

On December 17, 2020, Bernadette Jordan, the federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans announced that open-net salmon farm licences in the Discovery Islands would be phased out by June 30, 2022.