Ecojustice’s Youth-led Climate Lawsuit Against the Ontario Government

As Canada's largest environmental law charity, Ecojustice takes governments and polluters to court; exposes illegal practices; and shapes new laws to meet the urgency of the climate and ecological crises.

Ecojustice uses their legal expertise to take aim at the root causes of environmental harm and protect what we value most - the air, land and water that sustains all life.

For more than 30 years, Ecojustice lawyers have represented grassroots activists, Indigenous communities, environmental organizations, and everyday Canadians — free of charge, thanks to thousands of generous supporters from across the country.

Ecojustice lawyers Fraser Thomson (furthest left) and Danielle Gallant (furthest right) with our clients: seven courageous young people from across Ontario fighting for a safe climate future.

Photo Credit: Emily Chan

The Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph proudly supports Ecojustice’s ground-breaking youth-led Charter challenge against the Ontario government for their failure to act on climate change. One of the first cases of its kind in Canada, Mathur et. al. v Ontario builds on a global trend of litigation brought on behalf of young people who will be disproportionally affected by the severe impacts of climate change.

The case made Canadian legal history in 2020 when, for the first time ever, a Canadian court ruled that fundamental rights protected under the Charter can be threatened by climate change and citizens have the ability to challenge a Canadian government’s action on the climate crisis under the highest law in the land.

This September, Ecojustice is heading to court on behalf of seven young Ontarians in a landmark climate lawsuit – marking an unprecedented opportunity to constitutionalize government responsibility for climate action.

You can learn more about this historic case and the seven brave young people who are fighting for a safe climate future on behalf of future generations at #GenClimateAction: Mathur et. al. v. Her Majesty in Right of Ontario (ecojustice.ca).

Our partners at Indigenous Climate Action (ICA) have applied to join the case as intervenors which means they will have the opportunity to present via pro-bono lawyers their own arguments in support of the claims in our case. Indigenous Climate Action is much smaller than Ecojustice but they are mighty. They share our vision of a brighter environmental future for people living today and future generations. Their mission is to inspire action through the development of tools and opportunities created with, by and for our communities, with the goal of uplifting Indigenous voices, sovereignty, and stewardship of the lands and waters for future generations.

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We stand at a pivotal moment in time.

Thanks to numerous supporters including the Sisters of St Joseph, Ecojustice is ready to build on the valuable progress that we have made as we tackle the greatest challenge of our era: climate change.

Around the world, young people — afraid for their future yet inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden —are resolutely raising their voices to demand greater climate ambition from world leaders.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a special report last year with the stark warning that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must halve in the next decade and reach zero by 2050.

We must act now if we are to stay within 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels and avoid catastrophic climate change.

Since the IPCC report was released, Ecojustice’s message that government must take meaningful action to lower Canada’s GHG emissions has been amplified – and our successful track record of using the power of the law to defend your right to a safe climate has continued.

Amidst the world’s heightened threat of rising sea levels, forest fires, mass species extinction and climate related human health issues, we are seeing sprouts of hope through the courts.

Last year, two Ecojustice victories prevented an additional 21.9 million tonnes of heat-trapping gases from entering the atmosphere each year. 

First, we stopped the expansion of a coal transfer facility on the Fraser River, which would have carried four million tonnes of thermal coal by open-car rail from Wyoming through communities in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland, bound for foreign markets. Ecojustice played a key role in the local Port Authority’s decision to cancel the permit for this project.

Stopping this proposed expansion prevented 6.9 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from being released into the atmosphere annually and protected the health of communities from exposure to coal dust.

Second, Ecojustice’s successful Trans Mountain lawsuit saw the Court confirm that the federal government cannot legally approve an industrial project based on a flawed environmental assessment — in this case, an assessment that ignored the impacts of marine shipping on endangered orcas.

By halting construction on Trans Mountain, we stopped more than 15 million tonnes of additional carbon emissions from polluting our climate each year. And that’s not all.

Earlier this year, Ecojustice also secured a major win for wild salmon. The Federal Court issued a decision that struck down the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans’ policy of not testing for a contagious virus widespread in open-net fish farms off the coast of British Columbia.

In its ruling, the court made clear that government must take a precautionary, science-based approach to managing fish farms, which includes considering their impacts on at-risk wild salmon populations.

These victories are a testament to what we can accomplish when we work together.

Transition can be hard to notice when you are in the middle of it, but each victory signals that we are making the changes that our planet needs to avert disaster — and is a testament to our collective power.

Ecojustice’s combination of law reform, litigation, and public outreach will achieve accountability in law, combined with durable governance frameworks to strengthen and sustain the efforts of the current and future Canadian governments to combat climate change.

Together, we will protect precious carbon stores like Canada’s boreal forest and accelerate the transition to renewable energy and low carbon communities, and help Canada seize our unique opportunity to set a positive example for other industrialized countries and pave the way for developing countries.

By Huda Al-Saedy - halsaedy@ecojustice.ca

Ecojustice 

Microbeads add up to big problem for Great Lakes

Microbeads are tiny plastic beads commonly used for their exfoliating properties in personal care products such as facial cleansers, body wash and toothpaste. Generally 0.5 mm or smaller in diameter, these particles get rinsed down drains during use, and are dispersed into the environment through wastewater treatment plants which are not designed to remove or treat microbeads. Treated wastewater is then typically discharged into freshwater rivers or lakes.

Microbeads are an emerging issue of global concern. One study, for example, found a single tube of facial scrub to contain more than 330,000 microbeads. These tiny bits of plastic are now distributed widely in both marine and freshwater environments — in the water, on the seabed, and on beaches.  They are ingested by many organisms throughout the food web, including plankton, invertebrates, small fish, birds and mammals. Along the way they act as sponges for dangerous chemicals and contaminants such as PCBs and flame retardants — which accumulate in species low on the food chain and are passed on to larger predators, eventually contaminating the fish and wildlife species that humans eat.

In the face of increasing public concern over the use of microbeads, a number of large personal care product manufacturers have expressed their intention to phase them out and replace them with biodegradable alternatives. This is an important first step, as microbead use is completely unnecessary: Effective biodegradable alternatives, such as ground apricot kernels and jojoba beads, are readily available and already widely used in personal care products.

There’s also growing momentum in the United States to get microbeads out of personal care products. Last year, Illinois enacted legislative provisions that will prohibit the manufacture and sale of personal care products containing microbeads. New Jersey just followed suit and enacted similar legislation. A ban is also looking promising in Indiana, and Ohio, New York, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Vermont, Maine, and Washington State are all currently considering similar legislative measures.

Meanwhile in Canada …
No similar efforts have yet occurred in Canada except for the recent introduction of a private member’s bill to ban the manufacture and addition of microbeads to consumer products in Ontario — even though plastic microbeads are a particular environmental threat to Canada’s iconic Great Lakes. In fact, microbeads make up 20 per cent of plastic pollution in the Great Lakes, which provide drinking water to 8.5 million Canadians.

Scientists have found millions of microbeads in just one square kilometer of parts of the Great Lakes. These bits of plastic have been found in Lakes Superior, Huron, and Erie, as well as in the St. Lawrence River, with the highest concentrations occurring near urban areas. Sample analyses show that the majority of microbeads come from facial cleaners.

And yet, a wide variety of products containing microbeads are still available on the Canadian market. While voluntary measures from manufacturers are a good first step, we cannot rely on that alone to prevent these substances from polluting water bodies. It’s time for Canada to take action and address the threats microbeads pose to the environment and, by extension, our health.

That’s why, on behalf of Environmental Defence, Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, and Ottawa River Waterkeeper, Ecojustice staff lawyer Tanya Nayler has submitted a request to Minister of the Environment Leona Aglukkaq asking that plastic microbeads used in personal care products be added to the Priority Substances list so that these can be assessed, designated and regulated as a toxic substance under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999. The Minister must respond to this request, with reasons, within 90 days.

The letter also asks Minister Aglukkaq to review Illinois’ decision to ban microbeads. Under CEPA, when the Minister receives notice that that another jurisdiction has or substantially restricted a substance for environmental or human health reasons, she is required to determine if that substance is toxic and should be regulated.

Our hope is that this request will put into motion the necessary steps to initiate a Canada-wide ban on microbeads, keeping these unnecessary pieces of plastic from piling up in our oceans, lakes and rivers and putting the environment and our health at risk.

Reposted with permission from Ecojustice