The Court of Appeal in 0694841 B.C. Ltd. v. Alara Environmental Health and Safety Limited clarified the environmental due diligence requirements when assigning a purchase agreement to another party. BACKGROUND 0694841 B.C. Ltd. (“069”) entered into a purchase agreement for commercial property. As part of its due diligence, 069 hired Alara Environmental Health and Safety ...
Planning to move soil for an upcoming project? You may be impacted by recent changes to BC’s soil relocation process. The province has officially moved away from ‘soil relocation agreements’, introducing new amendments to the Contaminated Sites Regulation which came into effect on March 1, 2023. A few of the major changes are explored below. ...
The Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench has provided clarity on the application of Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act to limitation periods for contamination claims. In Paramount Resources Ltd v Grey Owl Engineering Ltd, 2022 ABQB 333, the Court found that s. 218 of the Act could not save a pipeline owner’s claim against an ...
The Environmental Appeal Board (EAB) has clarified that limits and restrictions on activities under permits related to air contaminants cannot be used as a backdoor to target what are really the effects of air contaminants, i.e., odours. In 2018, GFL Environmental Inc. was issued an air quality management permit for the operation of a composting ...
Owners and operators of facilities that meet the National Pollutant Release Inventory (“NPRI”) reporting requirements must submit their reports by June 1, 2022. The NPRI is a publicly accessible inventory of pollutant releases, disposal and recycling governed by the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 and managed by Environment and Climate Change Canada. The NPRI is ...
The BC Supreme Court has provided some guidance on injunctive relief available in environmental contamination cases. In Ward v. Cariboo Regional District, the plaintiffs owned a rural residential property near Williams Lake that used a gravity sewage system operated by the Cariboo Regional District. The property suffered from two floods in 2015 and 2020, which ...
Let’s face it, contaminated sites remediation requires courage. Cleanup can be expensive, and the regulations are not bedtime reading. Developers want to avoid missteps, minimize exposure to claims by others, and maximize potential recovery of their costs of remediation against polluters. They will therefore often lean on lawyers with environmental expertise to guide them through ...
On December 6, 2019, the Supreme Court of Canada held two former owners of an Ontario pulp and paper mill liable for the costs of remediating and maintaining a waste disposal site located on the property. The two former owners, Resolute and Weyerhaeuser, are successors of the companies that abandoned the waste site decades prior. ...
The Department of National Defence was recently fined $175,000 under the federal Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 for failing to comply with the Storage Tank Systems for Petroleum Products and Allied Petroleum Products Regulations. This regulation came into force in 2008 to help reduce the risk of soil and groundwater contamination due to spills and ...
