Reading Time: 4 minutes The Alberta Water Council is interesting because of its role and how it makes decisions – by consensus only. This article is about two things. First it briefly describes the Alberta Water Council. Second, it talks about consensus decision-making – a way groups can work together toward a common goal even when their interests appear […]
About Jeff Surtees
ENVIRONMENT | The Crown’s Duty to Consult
Reading Time: 6 minutes 20/20: Looking back over the last 20 years What is the most important environmental law case in Canada since the turn of the century? Twenty years is a long time in Canadian environmental law, given that this area of law has only existed as a ‘thing’ for a little more than twice that length of […]
Water Regulation in Alberta: 5 Things You Need to Know
Reading Time: 4 minutes Water plus Earth, Wind and Fire. No … it’s not a day at the beach with a great band from Chicago. These are the names of the four classical elements, which in ancient times were thought to explain the nature of how the world worked. They are also the subjects of the next four LawNow […]
Note from the Publisher
Reading Time: 2 minutes Hello LawNow readers, From all of us here at the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta (CPLEA), we hope you had an enjoyable and relaxing summer! As many of you know, LawNow is published six times per year by CPLEA. This issue marks the start of LawNow’s forty-fourth year of publication. We wanted to take […]
How Are Environmental Laws Made?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Written environmental laws come in all different sizes and shapes. For example, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 has 356 sections, six schedules and fifty-seven sets of regulations. Other environmental laws are only one page long. Big or small, they all have a few things in common. They must be put in place by a […]
Important Concepts in Environmental Law – “Polluter Pays”
Reading Time: 4 minutes Your parents may have told you: “If you make a mess, you have to clean it up.” In a nutshell, that is the basis of the “polluter pays” principle. There is a lot wrapped up inside the simple principle of polluter pays. The roots of the principle come from economics rather than from environmentalism. The […]
Important Concepts in Environmental Law – The “Precautionary Principle”.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Last issue we talked about sustainable development. This time the topic is the precautionary principle. Most human activity has risk. When we are deciding whether we should do something, we balance the risks against the possible rewards. Risk has two parts. First, there is the probability that something bad will happen. Second, there is the […]
Important Concepts in Environmental Law – the Idea of “Sustainable Development”
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the next few columns I am going to talk about some concepts that are important to understanding environmental law. The first is the idea of sustainable development. A quick search of the CANLII website shows the phrase appears in Canadian federal and provincial legislation 359 times and in published court decisions 237 times. In […]
Bicycle Law in Alberta
Reading Time: 7 minutes As a cyclist, do you follow the rules of the road? According to a University of Colorado Survey, about eighty-five percent of cyclists do obey the law when riding. Almost three quarters of the scofflaws who break the rules claim to do so for their personal safety – saying they are simply getting out of […]
Are Environmentalists Good or Bad?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Tree-huggers. Greenies. Enviro-nazis. Eco-terrorists. Eco-extremists. City-dwellers. Radicals. Eco-vangelists. Eco-crazies. Sheeple. Foreign-funded __________________ (add any of the preceding epithets). What ARE environmentalists anyway? Are they good, wise, caring, rational, science-loving people put here to save us? Or are they deluded, uninformed, unreasonable, deranged lunatics out to destroy our jobs and our way of life, probably for […]
