Action on Environmental Justice – Improving Environmental Laws
Alongside legal representation, CELA aims to stay out of the courtroom by seeking change in policies and practices to make it unnecessary for citizens or communities to have to retain a lawyer to seek environmental justice. In fact, our policy work in shaping progressive environmental laws and regulations often arises from issues brought to us by public inquiries to our office. When we hear of many people affected by the same issue, systemic change is often the most effective and efficient solution.
Our law reform programs address multiple pollution sources, including greenhouse gases, and across all of this work our primary focus is on addressing public health and impacts on vulnerable communities.
CELA’s programs address the following areas (web-content will continue to be organized into each area in the coming months):
Access to Environmental Justice
- Law Reform: Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights
- Regional Services, including CELA’s Northern Services Program
- Law Reform: Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) legislation
- Right-to-Know laws and bylaws
- Indigenous rights
- and many additional areas addressed thematically below
Pollution and Health
- Community Right-to-Know (NPRI Working Group)
- Chemicals management by the federal government
- Indoor environmental health, including:
- the RentSafe project,
- Healthy Retrofits,
- Radon
- Child Health and the Environment – Foundational work at CELA
- A scoping review of early environmental exposures and associations with chronic disease
- Pesticides and pesticide regulation
- Industrial air pollution
- Waste and legacy contaminants including:
- efforts to ban asbestos
Water Sustainability
- Healthy Great Lakes
- Law Reform: Safe Drinking Water for All
- Law Reform: Get the Lead Out of Drinking Water
- Law reform: Ontario’s Safe Drinking Water Act
- Law reform: Ontario’s Clean Water Act
- Walkerton’s Drinking Water Protection Legacy (video interview series examining the continuing legacy of the Walkterton Inquiry)
- Source water protection
- Water quantity
Energy Policy
- Energy costs and Ontario residents on low income
- Nuclear safety and emergency preparedness
- Climate change
- Conservation and renewables
Environmental assessment and land use planning
- Law Reform: Federal environmental assessment law
- Provincial (Ontario) environmental assessment law
- Provincial land use planning law including the Planning Act and the Aggregate Resources Act
Acting Globally
- Aligning international law with domestic environmental law
- Environmental implications of international trade agreements
