Environmental Law

After years of relatively little pesticides litigation, there is suddenly an explosion of activity. The federal government is facing nine lawsuits (Including class actions) across the country arising from alleged pesticide contamination of the Gagetown military base. Some product liability l…

Canada’s first major battle on the place of greenhouse gases in environmental assessment continued this week, with a major defeat for Imperial Oil. As described in our April post, earlier this year, the Federal Court rejected Imperial’s CEAA Environmental Assessment of its huge K…

Making landfill gas capture mandatory makes it ineligible for carbon credits.

The Cosmetic Pesticides Ban Act will making the pesticide ban uniform across Ontario, and will transfer enforcement responsibility from municipalities to the Ministry of the Environment.

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…