Divided We Stand: Provinces And Feds Carry On The Scrap Over The Environment

When Canada's fathers of Confederation (there were no women at the table) first met in Charlottetown in 1864, little could they anticipate that the courts would still be hashing out the details 156 years after the product of their efforts, the British North America Act (now known as the Constitution Act, 1867) became Canada's Constitution. A good part of it is devoted to the division of powers between Canada's federal government and provincial governments. We are, after all, living in a federation.

In 1867, things looked simpler. Fisheries? Feds. Property and civil rights? Provinces. Currency and banking? Feds. Marriage? Provinces. Criminal law? Feds. No one would have contemplated “the environment” as a category of jurisdiction to be assigned exclusively to either level of government.