Ideologies Clashing: Corporations, Criminal Law, and the Regulatory Offence

This article explores the ideological dimensions of the current debate over the constitutional status of the regulatory offence. It contends that what animates this debate is an underlying conflict between competing liberal ideologies in which an emergent libertarian classical liberalism is increasingly undermining the dominance within legal discourse of a more statist-oriented pluralist liberalism. Moreover, it suggests that it is a debate which is closely connected to a more far-reaching ideological controversy over the future of the regulatory state. The article concludes by arguing that, within this debate, fundamental questions about the nature of corporate power and legal status are obscured, questions that a critical theory of the regulatory offence must confront

Ideologies Clashing: Corporations, Criminal Law, and the Regulatory Offence

This article explores the ideological dimensions of the current debate over the constitutional status of the regulatory offence. It contends that what animates this debate is an underlying conflict between competing liberal ideologies in which an emergent libertarian classical liberalism is increasingly undermining the dominance within legal discourse of a more statist-oriented pluralist liberalism. Moreover, it suggests that it is a debate which is closely connected to a more far-reaching ideological controversy over the future of the regulatory state. The article concludes by arguing that, within this debate, fundamental questions about the nature of corporate power and legal status are obscured, questions that a critical theory of the regulatory offence must confront

Understanding Canada\u27s Responses to Citizen Submissions Under the NAAEC

The North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC) is a side-agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), to which the United States, Canada, and Mexico are signatory parties (Parties). A central feature of the NAAEC is its citizen submission on enforcement matters (SEM) process, by which citizens and citizen groups from any of the three signatory countries can call on the NAAEC Secretariat to consider whether a Party is failing to effectively enforce its environmental laws. To date, there have been eighty-one citizen submissions filed against the three Parties. Much of the scholarship surrounding the SEM process has concerned its efficacy, particularly from the perspective of citizens and non-governmental organizations. In contrast, there has been relatively little work done that seeks to understand the manner in which the Parties have interacted with this innovative SEM process. To assess whether and to what extent the SEM process is working, and to envision ways that the process (or analogous ones) might be improved, it is. important to gain a better understanding of how governments perceive and react to processes of this kind. This Article represents a tentative foray into this research area. For this Article, we examined only SEM submissions against Canada. We used a case-study approach, selecting three cases that help illustrate any trend in the Canadian government\u27s response to SEM submissions. We then sought to understand Canada\u27s responses through three theoretical perspectives: realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. We begin by briefly describing the NAAEC and the SEM process in Part II. Part III lays out three cases in which submitters alleged that Canada had failed to effectively enforce its environmental laws and Canada\u27s responses to each of them. This is followed in Part IV by a discussion of trends in Canada\u27s responses arising from the case studies. In Part V, we analyze Canada\u27s responses through three theoretical perspectives. Finally, Part VI concludes by offering insights for further research

The Science, Law, and Politics of Canada\u27s Pathways to Paris: Introduction to UBC Law Review\u27s Special Section on Climate Change and Canada

This brief essay introduces two articles comprising a special section of the UBC Law Review on climate change law and policy in Canada

Polyjural and Polycentric Sustainability Assessment: A Once-in-a-Generation Law Reform Opportunity

The Canadian environmental assessment (EA) regime is broken. At a time when the Canadian economy is both increasingly sluggish and unsustainable, we have an obligation – and perhaps a once-in-a-generation opportunity – to fundamentally reform EA to enable it to finally live up to its promise of promoting sound and sustainability-based decisions. This task is even more pressing in light of the global commitment under the Paris Climate Change Agreement to rapidly transition to greenhouse gas emissions neutrality. Among the many priorities of meaningful EA reform – moving beyond project-level assessments, focusing on net positive contributions to sustainability, avoiding costly trade-offs among interdependent economic, ecological, and social objectives – we focus on the overarching need for polyjural collaboration and polycentric consensus-based decision-making. We argue that any serious effort to move from project-level EAs focused exclusively on adverse biophysical impacts towards a fully integrated, sustainability-based assessment (SA) regime requires a polyjural and polycentric approach capable of facilitating collaborative experimentation among multiple jurisdictional actors, including the federal government, provinces, territories, municipalities, Indigenous peoples, NGOs, academia, project proponents and industry groups, and the Canadian public. After examining the constitutional and political dimensions of the federal and provincial governments’ role in EA, we provide two compelling rationales for transitioning to a SA regime. The paper concludes by setting out a series of possible forms of SA for the purpose of informing the federal government’s review of its EA regime. In particular, we identify and analyze the competing options for jurisdictional cooperation, collaboration, and consensus-based assessment processes along with the constitutional and practical policy implications of each

The Past, Present, and Future of Canadian Environmental Law: a Critical Dialogue

In the critical dialogue that follows, Jason MacLean, an assistant professor at the Bora Laskin Faculty of Law at Lakehead University whose research focuses on environmental law, explores some of the most salient aspects of the past, present, and future of Canadian environmental law with two of Canada’s leading environmental scholars and practitioners: Meinhard Doelle, professor of law and associate dean of research at the Schulich School of Law and director of the Marine & Environmental Law Institute at Dalhousie University; and Chris Tollefson, professor and Hakai Chair in Environmental Law and Sustainability and executive director of the Environmental Law Centre (ELC) at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law

Potential for Solar System Science with the ngVLA

Radio wavelength observations of solar system bodies are a powerful method of probing many characteristics of those bodies. From surface and subsurface, to atmospheres (including deep atmospheres of the giant planets), to rings, to the magnetosphere of Jupiter, these observations provide unique information on current state, and sometimes history, of the bodies. The ngVLA will enable the highest sensitivity and resolution observations of this kind, with the potential to revolutionize our understanding of some of these bodies. In this article, we present a review of state-of-the-art radio wavelength observations of a variety of bodies in our solar system, varying in size from ring particles and small near-Earth asteroids to the giant planets. Throughout the review we mention improvements for each body (or class of bodies) to be expected with the ngVLA. A simulation of a Neptune-sized object is presented in Section 6. Section 7 provides a brief summary for each type of object, together with the type of measurements needed for all objects throughout the Solar System