Environment committee  Both at a provincial level and in the course of our monitoring the federal government's activity on the species at risk file, what seems to have emerged is the challenge of grappling with the extent of Canada's at-risk species population in terms of what that means on the part of

Environment committee  Ecojustice takes the position that you need both. An ecosystem-based approach at its best would enable protection of individual species in the necessary habitat, but the model that we've seen developed in Canada seeks to reduce the amount of habitat available to species to as sma

Environment committee  That question presumes that they've acted and they've harmed the environment. They should restore the land, to the extent that they can, but one thing that has been demonstrated clearly—and I'm not picking on the tar sands—is that they have yet to prove they can restore centuries

Environment committee  How much time do I have?

Environment committee  Okay. Well, I'm going to start with the second question first, which is about strengthening national laws and harmonizing them. One of the distinctions I want to make regarding harmonizing laws is that there's a difference between ensuring that bureaucratic delays don't jeopardiz

Environment committee  Right. So we take the position that the current laws we have, while not optimal, are being characterized as ineffective as laws when in fact bureaucracy and failure to implement effectively are what have jeopardized them. They're being weakened, not because they're ineffective on

Environment committee  There are best-practice countries almost everywhere in the world. There's no one country that stands out as having all the environmental laws we need. Certainly the Scandinavian countries are way far ahead of Canada. I would say that mostly the Commonwealth countries lag behind

Environment committee  Yes. I'd agree with everything Alan said. The only other comment I would make is that extensive analysis of this was undertaken when they were designing the Species at Risk Act and understanding the optimum way to manage the land doesn't rely on prohibitions and command and con

Environment committee  Absolutely.

Environment committee  The answer is yes. One of the shortcomings of Canadian environmental protection laws is that we fail to incorporate the cost or the harm associated with the activity. What that means for private companies that act on the ground is that the water is free, the air is free, and the

Environment committee  Up until about seven or eight years ago the federal government was undertaking a review of environmental protection laws that concluded that our current federal protection regime for the environment was too weak. In terms of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the Fishe

Environment committee  Thank you for having me. My name is Devon Page. I'm the executive director of Ecojustice. Ecojustice's mission is to use the law to protect and restore the environment. We're unique to the extent that we employ both lawyers and scientists to develop our cases. The primary activi