Advancing Environmental Law

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

• Chemicals management by the federal government
  • Law Reform: Reforming the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999
  • Law Reform: PFAS – The Forever Chemicals
• 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
  • Law Reform: Banning Cosmetic Pesticide Use
• Industrial air pollution
  • Law Reform: Air Quality Issues in Ontario
• 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
  • Source water protection in indigenous communities – legal tool kits
• Water quantity

Energy Policy

• Energy costs and Ontario residents on low income
• Nuclear safety and emergency preparedness
  • Nuclear Waste Management in Canada 
  • Climate Action and Nuclear Energy – The Case Against Small Modular Reactors in Canada
  • Public Oversight of the Nuclear Sector
• 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