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ARTICLE · 04 MARCH 2024

Environmental regulatory trends to watch in 2024: Another year of challenge

Environmental law continued to be a hot topic of debate in Canada in 2023, as various challenges to federal government efforts to regulate the environment came to a head.

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Environmental law continued to be a hot topic of debate in Canada in 2023, as various challenges to federal government efforts to regulate the environment came to a head. In 2024, we expect to see these challenges continue to develop, and new ones arise, as stakeholders continue their efforts to find balance between shared provincial and federal jurisdiction over the environment.

One of the most visible challenges to federal legislation in 2023 was the battle around plastic regulation. In November 2023, the Federal Court retroactively quashed and declared The Order Adding "Plastic Manufactured Items" as a Toxic Substance to Schedule I of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (the Order) invalid and unlawful, calling the government's policy "unreasonable and unconstitutional" (the PMI Decision). The Court found that designating all plastic manufactured items as toxic was overbroad and without an evidentiary foundation, given that the government had only studied

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