Environment committee  Thank you., I will be speaking in English today but I will try to answer questions in French if you speak slowly. I am a professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. I specialize in environmental and constitutional law. I'm also a recovering litigator. In my previous l

Environment committee  The answer is yes. I will continue in English. In two areas, Hydro-Québec's dissent dealt with both the criminal law power and the POGG power we talked about today. One of the things the dissenting judges made clear--because they didn't agree with upholding CEPA under the crimi

Environment committee  Responding to the spirit of the question, which is not whether it's the right target but how you get to that target, it seems to me that any lawyer who tells you they're certain of a constitutional outcome is a poor lawyer. But I think the exercise that seems to me most useful is

Environment committee  Thank you. I am going to speak in English today, since I don't speak French very well, as I've already demonstrated. However, if you speak slowly, I will try to answer questions in French. Thank you. I don't believe I've been before this committee for over one year or so. It's

Environment committee  That's a good question. You could ask the author of the book on private prosecutions in Canada, who is seated to my right and who could probably answer better than I can, but I'll take the first cut at it. First of all, the purpose of a prosecution is primarily to punish and d

Environment committee  We're looking at each other across the country--

Environment committee  Unfortunately, you have two environmental law experts here, and this usually falls under the labour law part of the curriculum. I know a little bit about whistle-blower legislation, but not enough to give you a detailed comparison of these two, except to say that I can tell you t

Environment committee  The simple answer to your question is-- Excuse me. I'm hearing myself talk and we don't want to do that. That will be possible, certainly. You could do it by amending the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and the Species at Risk Act. But it seems to me that there are proba

Environment committee  That's a very good question. I think that part of any bill of rights or charter kind of document is that it contains principles that when you stretch them to their limit begin to collide with each other or overlap. So the Charter of Rights has freedom of speech and freedom of r

Environment committee  David Boyd probably knows this issue better than anyone, so I won't add much except to say that there have been cases. For example, the Town of Hudson case took the precautionary principle, which is one of the principles referenced here and incorporated it as a customary principl

Environment committee  It's a good question, and one that I won't pretend I've thought of in great depth, but as a lawyer, I'll give you an opinion anyway, of course.

Environment committee  The thing that comes to mind is this--and I think there are two steps. One is that I think, for the reasons I gave, that this bill is likely to lead to meaningful improvements in environmental outcomes. Then the question becomes whether improved environmental performance links wi

Environment committee  It depends on the action. If it were a civil action, it would be on a balance of probabilities; if it were a criminal action, it would be beyond a reasonable doubt.

Environment committee  I'm aware only of common law countries, so certainly in common law countries, but I'm not aware of the others.

Environment committee  You're talking about paragraph 23(3)(b), I take it, right?