Abstract
Canadian environmental law has changed dramatically over the last 50 years, responding to some of the flaws and weaknesses identified by commentators seeking to explain the continuing trend in environmental degradation. The aim of this article is to tell the story of three pieces of Canadian environmental legislation, the Alberta Land Stewardship Act, the federal Species at Risk Act, and Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, with a view to exploring whether the environmental ambition underlying these pieces of legislation is being realized. Our overall conclusion is that there is a significant gap between the ambition of these three pieces of environmental legislation and their actual implementation but this gap arises from design choices made by the legislature and the executive, rather than something inherent in the law itself.
Highlights
The call for papers for this special issue asked to what extent the law, as an integral constituent of environmental law, may be responsible for the latter’s failure to prevent environmental degradation [1,2].In other words, is there something inherent about the law, that “particular family of human socialSustainability 2014, 6 arrangements, consisting of public and officially sanctioned norms defining both acceptable and unacceptable modes of individual and group behavior” [3], or about the subject that makes it problematic to enact and enforce a set of norms that will prevent environmental degradation.This is clearly a very large topic that is far beyond the compass of any particular contribution to this volume
Our discussion shows that while the courts can play a facilitative role in helping environmental statutes fulfill their “promise” [19], it will be much more difficult for them to play a constructive role in the face of broad discretionary powers and statutory standing tests which insulate statutory regimes from broader developments in the common law
Many of the weaknesses identified in the environmental law literature referred to in the introduction remain embedded in Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA)—most notably excessively discretionary executive powers—with the potential to undermine the implementation of this innovative legislation
Summary
The call for papers for this special issue asked to what extent the law, as an integral constituent of environmental law, may be responsible for the latter’s failure to prevent environmental degradation [1,2]. Sustainability 2014, 6 arrangements, consisting of public and officially sanctioned norms defining both acceptable and unacceptable modes of individual and group behavior” [3], or about the subject (the environment) that makes it problematic to enact and enforce a set of norms that will prevent environmental degradation This is clearly a very large topic that is far beyond the compass of any particular contribution to this volume. Our discussion shows that while the courts can play a facilitative role in helping environmental statutes fulfill their “promise” [19], it will be much more difficult for them to play a constructive role in the face of broad discretionary powers (as is the case under ALSA) and statutory standing tests which insulate statutory regimes from broader developments in the common law (as under EPEA)
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