December 10, 2025

Re: Advancing Environmental Justice consultation

To whom it may concern,

I am pleased to submit feedback on the development of the national strategy to advance environmental justice and to address environmental racism. Bill C-226 was my private member’s bill. I appreciated government support and pleased the bill received Royal Assent before adjournment in June 2024. This Bill was the result of decades of advocacy from the environmental community. In particular, I want to recognise the efforts of former MP Lenore Zann, Senator Mary Jane McCallum and Dr. Ingrid Waldron. Grassroots advocacy by community members from Pictou Landing and Shelburne, Nova Scotia; Kanehsatà:ke; Grassy Narrows, Ontario; and Aamjiwnaang First Nation was also critical.

Environmental Justice 

Environmental justice involves the equitable distribution of environmental harms and benefits, recognising that vulnerable communities already bear the brunt of costs. We have a duty to correct this injustice for present and future generations.

The amended 2023 Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) ensures that every individual in Canada has the right to a healthy environment. At the moment, the right to a healthy environment has not yet been implemented. A right that cannot be enforced is not a right.  Bill C-224, if properly implemented, can make this concept of a right an actual right.

CEPA is built on a foundation of environmental justice, intergenerational equity and non-regression. Relevant to this consultation is the substantive element that guarantees the right to live in an environment that is protected from harmful substances, pollutants and waste. Procedural elements such as access to information and participation in decision-making are also important.

CEPA recognises everyone’s right to a healthy environment: clean air, water and food for all Canadians. However, it is evident that not everyone has been advantaged equally by the natural environment. Canada is not a level playing field: vulnerable communities already face major deficits. These grievous environmental injustices need to be remedied first.

The federal government’s strategy should be guided by meaningful consultation and inclusion of affected communities, evidence-based decision making, the precautionary principle and a strong commitment to fairness and reparation. This is an essential opportunity to address past harms caused to marginalised communities (in particular, Indigenous, racialised and low-income communities) and to ensure a climate-safe and healthy future for all.

Environmental Racism 

For generations, Indigenous communities have been denied fundamental rights to access the environment. The Douglas Treaty enshrines Coast Salish people of southern Vancouver Island’s right to hunt and fish on their territories. However, this is rarely respected. In 1997, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans instituted a blanket ban on shellfish in Coles Bay in North Saanich, severely impacting the members of the Pauquachin First Nation, who rely on clams as part of their traditional diet. The closure was caused by E. coli pollution from poorly regulated neighbouring septic systems. Though the municipality of North Saanich had known of the issue for decades, it failed to act. Closing off access to shellfish has had significant negative impacts on the community, which relied on the harvest not just for food, but also as an economic, cultural, and educational site. Similarly, the Tstartlip and Tsawout and Tsecum nations have also been impacted, with shellfish harvesting prohibited for decades without any testing for contamination.

We need to honour Indigenous wisdom, taking the lead from Indigenous communities that have been responsible stewards of our natural environment since time immemorial. The government has an obligation to take preventative measures and conduct studies before infringing on treaty rights to hunt and fish.

Moreover, Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by pollution and hazardous waste contamination. Industries and governments make a deliberate decision to site these dangerous operations on and near Indigenous land. I think especially of the First Nations communities of Grassy Narrows, Kanehsatà:ke and Aamjiwnaang. These communities face mercury poisoning, high levels of cancer and other adverse health impacts due to the ongoing and cumulative result of proximity to toxic waste and petrochemical manufacturing sites.

The excellent work of advocacy groups such as Prevent Cancer Now and BRATS in the Battlefield brings attention to the persistent issue of chemical contamination on military bases. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and Gagetown, New Brunswick are two of the most egregious examples. The health impacts of contaminants on employees and surrounding communities such as autoimmune diseases, thyroid diseases and cancer are well documented.

Now, the pressing concern is the Department of National Defense “gifting” contaminated land to municipalities to build low-income housing. These include Wateridge Village, Ottawa; Arbo Downsview, Toronto; and Naawi Oodena, Winnipeg. This issue has not been adequately studied and could have disastrous health impacts on these already-vulnerable communities.

Historically, regulations around hazardous chemicals have protected industries over people’s health. Adequate care and testing measures (e.g., long term epidemiological studies) have not been taken. We must adopt the precautionary principle as a screen when making decisions on chemical use that affects Black, Indigenous, racialised and low-income communities. We must not sacrifice due process for speed. This is essential for achieving equity and upholding the right to a healthy environment.

Achieving True Progress Towards Environmental Justice 

In 2020, the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur released a report on the implications of the environmentally sound management and disposal of hazardous substances and wastes on human rights in Canada. The report states that

The prevalence of discrimination in Canadian laws and policies regarding the application of regulations on hazardous substances and wastes is clear. There exists a pattern in Canada whereby marginalized groups, and indigenous peoples in particular, find themselves on the wrong side of a toxic divide, subject to conditions that would not be acceptable in respect of other groups in Canada.

A natural environment conducive to the highest attainable standard of health is not treated as a right; unfortunately, for many in Canada today, it is an elusive privilege. Canada has obligations regarding the rights to information, participation, access to justice and remedies, and specific obligations regarding vulnerable groups.

Elements of an effective strategy to confront environmental racism and build environment justice must include full transparency and access to information about pollutants on and near Indigenous territories and in areas near communities of colour and or marginalised communities. Economically disadvantaged, Indigenous and racialised communities must have access to experts, such as epidemiologists, toxicologists as well as legal assistance through federal funding sources to support environmental justice. Such funding must ensure they stand on equal footing confronting the well funded polluters.  Lastly, an environmental justice programme must include mechanisms for government to claim damages from polluters to assist in financing the environmental justice funding programmes.

A national strategy to address environmental justice and environmental racism is long overdue. I look forward to the tabling of the new strategy by June 2026. Thank you for your time and consideration of my comments.

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Bill C-226 

In June 2024, I was pleased to see my Private Member’s Bill C-226, National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Act, passed into law. Many thanks to former MP Lenore Zann (Cumberland—Colchester), Senator Mary Jane McCallum, Dr. Ingrid Waldron, and countless other allies who helped push this legislation through. 

The primary goals of Bill C-226 are to advance environmental justice and to assess, prevent, and address environmental racism. This Act requires the Minister of Environment and Climate Change to produce a national strategy for environmental justice by June 20, 2026. The Minister must then report on progress every five years. 

This Act builds on the work of Bill S-5 (Strengthening Environmental Protection for a Healthier Canada Act) which became law in 2022 and amends the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA). Bill S-5 guarantees the right to a healthy environment and specifically considers environmental justice in decision-making. The Act also reflects the government’s 2021 commitment to implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).  

This consultation will walk you through the government’s progress thus far on addressing environmental racism and environmental justice. You do not need to be an expert on the topic to participate. I encourage you to share your personal reflections and experiences, especially if you have been disproportionately affected by environmental impacts or climate change due to identities you hold (e.g., if you are Indigenous, young, racialized, low-income, or have a disability).  

Environmental Racism

According to researcher Dr. Ingrid Waldron, environmental racism describes “environmental policies, practices, or directives that disproportionately disadvantage individuals, groups, or communities (intentionally or unintentionally) based on race or colour”. Often, it is Black and Indigenous communities that are most impacted by health and environmental harms due to contamination and pollution. Examples of communities that have experienced environmental racism include: 

• Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia, Ontario (an area known as Chemical Valley), which is greatly impacted by air pollution from oil refineries and power-generating stations
• Shelburne, Nova Scotia, home to the largest concentration of Black Nova Scotians and where the Morvan Road Landfill is situated 
• Kebaowek First Nation near Chalk River, Ontario, which is fighting against the development of a near-surface nuclear waste disposal facility on their land

More resources:

• Environmental Racism in Canada (2020) – Dr. Ingrid Waldron 
• “Environmental racism in Canada: What is it, what are the impacts, and what can we do about it?” (2020) – Ecojustice
• There’s Something in the Water (2019) 
  • Documentary about the disproportionate environmental impacts faced by Indigenous and Black communities in Nova Scotia (links to watch)

Environmental Justice

Environmental justice, a term coined by activists at the 1991 People of Colour Environmental Leadership Summit, seeks to ensure meaningful inclusion of affected people in decision-making and the equitable sharing of costs and benefits of environmental decisions. This means that all communities have fair access to voice their concerns and that no one community bears the brunt of environmental harms. This is a critical consideration as we pursue climate solutions that guarantee a livable future for all, not just a select few. 

More resources: 

• 17 Principles of Environmental Justice (1991) – First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. 
• Principles of Climate Justice (2009) – Environmental Justice Leadership Forum on Climate Change
• Summary of the September 2024 Canadian Environmental Justice and Racism Symposium 

The post Have Your Voice Heard! Public Consultation on Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism. appeared first on Elizabeth May.

Please see the below press release for more information:

International definition of ecocide – PRESS RELEASE

For more information on the International Alliance of Parliamentarians for the recognition of ecocide, please visit www.ecocidealliance.org

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Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands)
2021-03-10 17:19 [p.4844]

Madam Speaker, the hon. member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay was absolutely right. The science demands that we have a milestone year in 2025 that is meaningful.
The act, as written, is dangerous. How does the hon. parliamentary secretary square the real science with this fake bill?

Francesco Sorbara (Vaughan—Woodbridge)
2021-03-10 17:20 [p.4844]

Madam Speaker, I look to what the former leader of the New Democratic Party stated when we tabled Bill C-12. He said this was a real plan to fight climate change. A number of organizations and stakeholders commented positively on not only where this takes our government, but where this takes the country in hitting its 2050 target. I can send the hon. member the list.

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The Australian bushfire storms may yet prove to be a tipping point in global climate consciousness. Or, like the images of Hurricane Katrina (when we thought that changed everything), or the satellite images of disappearing Arctic ice, the modern human family may just turn the page to the next big story. As I write this, that next big story is the coronavirus.

But it is worth considering: the koala bears and their burned paws, the silhouette of the leaping kangaroo with a backdrop of the inferno, the tornado cloud made of flame—these images might just save us.

We are perilously near other “tipping points”—the real and irreversible ones that represent an atmospheric point of no return. Still, our climate discourse is remarkably soporific and sophomoric. Politicians around the world (at least, those who claim to want climate action) talk of “meeting our Paris targets,” without knowing what they are or understanding what they would mean. And, of course, global bullies like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and U.S. President Donald Trump make even those climate pretenders look good.

We really do need to understand just a little basic climate science. Beyond the confusing political babble of percentage cuts and shifting base years, there are some absolutes, things we know with certainty. We know (thanks to the analysis of air bubbles in Antarctic ice cores) that over nearly the last million years atmospheric CO2 never exceeded 280 parts per million. We know that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are now well above 400 ppm. We know that we’ve forced these changes—slowly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and rapidly in the last half of the 20th century.

In cold periods, the ice ages, there was far less carbon dioxide inside the little bubble of our atmosphere (Carl Sagan once compared it to a layer of saran wrap around a basketball), but there were trace amounts, enough to keep the planet warm enough for human life to take hold. But even in the warmest periods, of tropical jungles at the poles, it never went above 280 ppm. When one considers that narrow band of atmospheric CO2 over a million years of earth’s history, the force of going from 280ppm to over 400ppm in a cosmic blink of an eye should get peoples’ attention.

No scientist will hazard a guess as to when “too late” really is. But we do know with certainty that with every increase in the concentrations of CO2, we are worsening the odds that human civilization will remain functional to the end of this century. We are gambling. We won’t beat the house.

The big danger is unleashing something referred to as “hot house Earth” or runaway global warming. The risk is from “positive feedback loops.” The carbon we put into the atmosphere sets in motion natural events which themselves put more carbon into the atmosphere, and so we accelerate the whole process.

Positive feedback loops come, for example, from melting permafrost that releases methane that warms the atmosphere that melts the permafrost and so on, from forest fires releasing CO2 that warms the atmosphere that dries the forest, and so on; from Arctic ice melting away and reflecting less sunlight and making the oceans warmer and melting more ice, and so on. And so, on and on. The big tipping point is unleashing self-accelerating, unstoppable warming.

British Columbia’s forests offer a key example of economic loss and damage from two positive feedback loop events. The first, the pine beetle epidemic, killed an area of forest as large as New England. Before the climate crisis, a cold snap in winter would have knocked out burgeoning beetle populations. So, a warming world led to the epidemic, which itself left standing dead trees—which in positive feedback loop fashion released more carbon one year than all human activity in B.C.

Feedback loop zinger-number-two was that the dead trees became standing and fallen fuel. Hot dry summers led to the tinder dry conditions for the extraordinary fire seasons that released massively more carbon dioxide, while leading to Beijing-like air quality in Victoria—far from the fires.

The fires in Australia in the 2019-2020 season were also caused by the hot dry conditions. Australian scientists have been warning of more forest fires due to global warming for years. Leading Australian scientist Dr. Tim Flannery, author of the global 2005 best-seller The Weather Makers, wrote recently:

“The first scientific report warning of an increase in dangerous fires was published in 1985. Australia’s Climate Council (for which I’m the chief councillor) has published eleven reports over the past six years warning of the increasing danger of bushfires as fire intensity strengthens and the fire season gets longer,” he wrote in the mid-January issue of the bi-weekly New York Review of Books.

This year’s fires have emitted more than 250 megatonnes of carbon to the atmosphere, roughly half of the total amount of Australia’s emissions in 2018. And, of course, they killed at least 24 people and millions of animals, destroyed 2,000 homes, burned 18 million acres, and hit the Australian economy hard.

Yet, Australia, like Canada, is one of the world’s worst performers in climate action. Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia and the United States are ranked the lowest in the industrialized world in terms of real climate action.

I have to believe—because I refuse to accept an unlivable world for my grandchildren—that humanity is on the verge of a massive economic shift to reject fossil fuels. So, it is sobering to read what Tim Flannery thinks Australia’s political leadership will do, again in the New York Review of Books:

“A significant minority of federal conservative politicians are climate change deniers, as well as part of the ‘revolving door’ system of Australian politics—whereby politicians enter as lobbyists for the fossil-fuel industry, emerge as government ministers, and then exit politics to become directors of fossil-fuel companies.

“I’m fairly certain that Australia’s bushfire crisis will not change this system. The next federal election is two and a half years away, and there’s just too much self-interest—too much money to be made pandering to the fossil-fuel industry—even if the cost of it is to send the country up in smoke.”

Similarly, most Canadian media pundits see nothing wrong with the prospect of the Trudeau administration spending billions in public funds to build a new pipeline. The new price tag on the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) is over $12.6 billion, up from $5.4 billion, in addition to the $4.5 billion Ottawa paid in 2018 to acquire the existing pipeline and route from Kinder Morgan.

We are operating in a fog. Or maybe it’s just the smoke. Perhaps the light from the fires of Australia may finally help us see things clearly.

As published in Policy Magazine, https://policymagazine.ca/australia-ground-zero-of-climate-politics/.

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Elizabeth May

Dec. 9th, 2019

MADRID — The governments of the world have met every single year since 1995 to add precision and ambition to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — all the while failing miserably.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference of the signatories to the UNFCCC — also known as the Conference of the Parties (hence COP) — does this to advance, at an excruciatingly slow pace, progress under the UNFCCC, which was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. A “party” is any nation that has signed and ratified the 1992 climate treaty. All nations on earth have done so.

In 1992, every nation accepted the science and committed to reducing greenhouse gases to avoid levels that could be “dangerous.” Canada was in the lead back then, when former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney made a commitment to freeze our level of emissions at 1990 levels. Instead, globally, we have burned more fossil fuels between 1992 and today than between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and 1992. Canada’s emissions are now 17 percent higher than they were when we made the pledge at Rio.

So, here we are in Madrid. Today, Monday, marked the beginning of the second week at the 25th COP. While every COP has the same rhythm, some are more intense than others. Negotiations are predictably slow. Major sticking points remain around Article 6 — the last remaining section of the Paris Agreement needing clear rules of application. Article 6 deals with global carbon markets — an area where lax rules could undermine the whole agreement. As the high-level negotiations on Article 6 get underway, it occurs to me that our best outcome might be to leave the article dormant. We’ll see how the negotiations unfold. I predict all-nighters.

Meanwhile, there were some rays of hope. Today, in the midst of the annual COP “Fossil of the Day Awards,” a rare “Ray of the Day” was awarded to Denmark for completing its climate legislation. This huge achievement cleared its last hurdles on Friday. The law — like the one Justin Trudeau promised in our recent election campaign — commits Denmark to carbon neutrality by 2050. Like Trudeau’s pledge, Denmark’s law commits to legally binding targets at five-year intervals.

The first of Denmark’s intervals starts where we should — in 2020. And unlike Canada, Denmark is serious about reaching 2050 neutrality. Its climate pledge is to cut its emissions 70 percent below its 1990 levels by 2030. Canada’s target is still 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

More good news from New Zealand, where Green Leader James Shaw is the Climate Minister. Working closely with Labour leader and prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, they managed to gain all-party support for their law — passed in early November. It also commits to carbon neutrality — or close to it — by 2050 with an independent Climate Change Commission setting targets derived from science in five-year increments.

Catching up with James today at COP25, he stressed how important it was to have achieved a bipartisan consensus on the NZ law. Knowing that all parties are onside “really drives the market,” he told me. It is already shifting investments in a big way.

So, rays of hope are wonderful to find. Canada’s new environment and climate change minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, arrives tomorrow. Against the odds, I keep hoping Canada will surprise.

Elizabeth May is the former leader of the Green Party of Canada.

Click here to read the article as it was originally published in Policy Magazine.

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