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Toronto Public Health was due to report back in May on its proposed precedent-setting bylaw for Environmental Disclosure and Reporting. Instead, staff advise: We are currently proposing to report to the Board of Health in June or July, not May as planned.  The feedback from stakeholders was …

This year, Earth week in Ontario was marked by three small steps in the long battle to keep from destroying our own world. Each of the three had as much cultural as legal significance. Last summer, this blog got coast-to-coast publicity for our call for action on clothesline bans. Clotheslin…

Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development v. Canada is the first Canadian legal decision to turn on how greenhouse gas emissions are disclosed. In this case, four nongovernmental organizations challenged the environmental assessment of a huge oil sands mine. The Kearl mine required a fed…

What do polluting tenants owe their landlords?  Typically, industrial leases have been interpreted to require polluting tenants to remediate their contamination at the end of the lease.

Boilerplate" discussions of environmental issues are no longer acceptable because they do “not provide meaningful information to investors”.

Aboriginal issues are increasingly important in all areas of Canadian law and environmental law is no exception. One area of conflict concerns environmentally hazardous activities carried out on reserves, without provincial environmental regulation. Equivalent federal rules are often weak an…

Scientists have known for decades that low concentrations of drugs are often present in drinking water, but there has not been much published on drugs in the Canadian water supply. A recent study conducted by Servos et al. for Environment Canada’s National Water Research Institute (NWR…

On April 9 and 10, the Ontario Divisional Court will hear an important appeal: do applicants for environmental approvals have to do more than meet MOE standards? In Lafarge Canada v. Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal, Lafarge and the Ministry of the Environment will be lined up on one si…

The MOE has pushed ahead with its regulation to restrict Environmental Site Assessments to professional engineers and geoscientists, as of October, 2009. O. Reg. 66/08 amends the definition of Qualified Person in O. Reg. 153/04. This will exclude agrologists and technologists, who now perfor…