Right to healthy environment will need defining after becoming law, Ottawa says

A proposed amendment to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act says the government will have up to two years after the bill takes effect to define what the right means.

More than five years after being told it should enshrine the right to a healthy environment in its environmental protection act, the federal government is moving to do it.

But it wants another two years to figure out exactly what that will mean in practice.

The amendment to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is one of 87 recommendations to the government made in 2017 when the House of Commons environment committee completed a mandatory review of the act.

In 2018, then-environment minister Catherine McKenna said the government was going to wait until after the 2019 election to bring forward the legislation and would spend the intervening months consulting on the best way to proceed.

It took the government until April 2021 to introduce the change, but that bill died without debate when the 2021 election was called in August. An almost identical bill was reintroduced in the Senate in February.

The Canadian Environmental Protection Act is known colloquially as CEPA (pronounced SEEPA). It’s the legislation that spells out what chemicals can and can’t be used in Canada, and how those that can be toxic must be used and disposed of.

It’s the act that is supposed to protect people from things like asbestos, mercury and lead. It’s what allowed Canada to ban bisphenol A in baby bottles in 2010, and helped reduce mercury emissions in the air and water by more than 60 per cent since 2007.

Most recently, the government added plastic garbage to the list of toxic substances, arguing it poses a risk to human and animal health, which is allowing Ottawa to ban certain kinds of single-use plastics like straws, cutlery and takeout containers.