Business Law

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…

One of the classic homeowner nightmares keeps happening: a determined man with a wrench pumps oil into a house long since converted to gas. A recent Ontario case asked: does any liability fall on the person who did the conversion?

This month, the U.S. EPA announced a very modest tightening of its ground-level ozone standards from 80 to 75 parts per billion, averaged over eight hours. This announcement met immediate criticism from public health advocates, since an extensive scientific review had recommended that the st…

In McElmurray v. USDA, 2008 WL 516751 (S.D.Ga.), a U.S. court has strongly criticized American biosolids policy, and awarded compensation to a farmer whose fields were poisoned by sewage sludge. McElmurray sought federal disaster compensation, on the ground that Augusta, Georgia’s muni…