Our Legal Aid team is excited to announce that the Environmental Dispute Resolution Fund (EDRF) has a new application form and has raised the rate we can pay for legal and expert services. We hope that these initiatives make the EDRF a more accessible resource for individuals, First Nations and community groups that need legal help to protect their health and environment.

To be a responsible fiscal manager, you need a budget. And to be a responsible climate leader, you also need a budget – a carbon budget.

7:29am, Thursday, August 30th, 2018:
We’re in a boardroom high above downtown Vancouver, not far from Robson Street where I’m told there used to be a great hunting path. I’m on the Federal Court of Appeal’s website, refreshing my web browser obsessively.

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.

West Coast Environmental Law was thrilled when the BC government tabled Bill 32, the Protection of Public Participation Act on May 15^th, and nobody was happier than those of us in the Environmental Legal Aid department.

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

In honour of World Environment Day today, and its global theme #BeatPlasticPollution, we’ve got some helpful tips for how you can urge the federal government to take action to reduce plastic pollution across the country.

Kinder Morgan’s self-imposed May 31 deadline to achieve political certainty for building the Trans Mountain project is rapidly approaching.

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. Yet all is not well for the fish: Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) just issued recreational fishing bans for the entire Skeena River watershed due to low numbers of returning salmon.