At 3pm Wednesday, the New Brunswick Environmental Network is officially launching proposed legislation that would see the right to a healthy environment enshrined in New Brunswick law.
The New Brunswick Environmental Bill of Rights: An Act to Protect Children, All New Brunswickers and Nature is what NBEN calls a “locally made solution” that they hope MLAs will pick up and bring into the New Brunswick legislature.
Today’s launch features a keynote presentation from Dr. David Boyd, lawyer, author, and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment.
CHMA called up organizer Bonnie Hamilton Bogart to find out more about the bill, and today’s event.
The focus on children is right in the title of the proposed legislation, but Bogart points out, “when children are protected from environmental harm, then we are all protected.”
“Basically, it is to ensure that children, and therefore all New Brunswickers and future generations, have the right to a healthy environment,” says Bogart. “It’s also going to ensure that people have access to the necessary environmental information that they need, so that they can participate in environmental decision making. And it’s going to provide mechanisms for New Brunswickers to obtain legal remedies to prevent or redress environmental harm.”
The proposed act establishes an environmental registry, to be a sort of public storing house for all information and activities related to the environment in New Brunswick. It also establishes the role of an environmental rights commissioner to oversee the continued implementation of the act.
New Brunswick would not be the first province in Canada to adopt environmental rights legislation. Quebec has included the right in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and Ontario passed an Environmental Bill of Rights in 1993. The three territories also have “modest environmental rights legislation”, writes David Boyd. And PEI’s provincial legislature just approved second reading of their Bill 108 – Environmental Bill of Rights.
As for the NBEN’s proposed Bill of Rights, Bogart says, “this is not something that we’ve modelled from any other jurisdiction. We we just set out to make something that was specific to our situation here in New Brunswick.”
As a network of environmental organizations in New Brunswick, the NBEN, “decided to pull together a few interested environmental organizations in the province to put together a caucus that would work on this bill exclusively as a project,” says Bogart. And so the bill was born.
The NBEN proposed legislation is available on their website.