Five years ago, on April 11, 2019, the Coastal Protection Act was passed with all-party support. Now, the Government of Nova Scotia has abandoned the Act in favour of a “plan” that preserves the status quo and fails to implement best practices for coastal management.

Co-authors Mike Kofahl (ECEL) and Karen McKendry (EAC) explore the challenges of assessing and regulating impacts of spaceports.

On Monday, February 26th, the Government of Nova Scotia publicly announced that it was abandoning work to implement the Coastal Protection Act, which would have been Canada’s first legislation dedicated to coastal protection if it had been brought into force. Instead, the province opted to create another plan that maintains the status quo and fails to provide rules or protect coastal communities.

This blog post is the second installment of a two-part series inspired by the proposed Environmental Bill of Rights that was introduced to Prince Edward Island’s Legislative Assembly on April 8, 2021.

In the second part of this blog series, I highlighted opportunities for restorative justice to be used for the purposes of finding justice when environmental offences have been committed. In this part, I discuss the role for restorative approaches in decision-making processes where no offences have occurred. The focus of this post is on restorative process as a tool for education and engagement.

In the first part of this blog series on restorative environmental law, I advocated generally for restorative justice to be used in environmental law because of its inclusion of communities in justice processes and outcomes. In this post, I will examine restorative justice in the context of environmental offences.

I was first introduced to restorative justice in my second summer of law school, when I spent two months working at the Community Justice Society (“CJS”) in Halifax. CJS is a non-profit organization that runs the restorative justice program on behalf of the Department of Justice in the Halifax Regional Municipality.