Once a middling player in Canada’s fossil fuel industry, B.C. has become a major fracking hub in the last two decades.
If the province’s planned LNG boom appears, gas extraction will surge higher. According to the province, its new fuel business comes with green credentials, delivering “some of the lowest-emission LNG in the world.”
The have-it-both-ways policy approach is familiar: its proponents argue that ramped-up fossil fuel extraction can coincide with climate leadership. It’s a message regularly echoed by provincial and federal governments in Canada and beyond.
But is it legal?
Experts warn that a growing body of international and domestic law is raising new legal stakes for major fossil fuel companies and the governments that permit their activities, particularly those like B.C. that are ramping up new fossil fuel industries as the harmful impacts of climate change compound.
“They're opening themselves up to liability, as well as violating the rights of Canadians by continuing to do this,” said Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, which recently published a report outlining the legal landmines B.C. could face as it fashions itself into a major global LNG supplier.
In the last decade, a growing body of international and domestic case law points to the legal stakes of climate change and governments’ obligations to prevent it. The decisions have begun to challenge long-held norms of climate change accounting established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which limits countries’ sphere of climate responsibility to the emissions produced within their own borders. Increasingly, courts are giving shape to the legal obligations of countries when the fossil fuels they produce are burned elsewhere.
Perhaps surprisingly, given its interest in further expanding its fossil fuel business, Canada voted in support of more-expansive climate accountability last month, when it joined 140 countries in voting for a successful motion at the UN General Assembly. The motion adopted a legal opinion from the International Court of Justice that determined that the continued expansion and subsidization of fossil fuels could constitute an “internationally wrongful act” with legal and financial ramifications.
The motion opens up new pathways for climate-affected countries to seek damages from major fossil fuel exporters.
“When we say existential threat, we speak not in metaphor, we speak from lived experience,” said Fiji’s permanent UN representative, Filipo Tarakinikini, after the vote passed on May 20. “This is an affirmation of survival.”
Despite recent strides, it remains unclear whether legal actions will have a meaningful impact on governments intent on expanding fossil fuel production. Court rulings are by design incremental, sometimes taking years or even decades to reach groundbreaking conclusions. But Julien Beaulieu, a Canadian lawyer and postgraduate researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science, noted that Canada’s current policy environment — heavy on climate policy rollbacks and renewed efforts to expedite fossil fuel projects — could lead frustrated citizens to turn to the courts.
“When there's less ambition, or when there's deregulation, then that's where litigation kicks up,” he said. “It’s what you do when there’s nothing else.”
Global climate litigation grows
Around the world, climate change litigation is in a growth spurt, increasing over the last two decades from just a few cases filed in the early 2000s to more than 3,000 cases filed by 2025. In the last decade, 276 cases reached high courts around the world. Although 80 per cent involve government defendants, a recent London School of Economics report says climate litigation is most successful in high courts when suits directly target fossil fuel companies.
Though climate litigation isn’t always successful, increasing numbers of wins are causing ripple effects. Financial markets now consider climate litigation to pose a relevant financial risk, and groups like the World Economic Forum warn that climate litigation could begin to have substantial material effects for companies, noting that “evidence is mounting that the courts are beginning to listen in some jurisdictions.”
Canada’s own legal landscape for nation-level climate litigation is more muted, said Beaulieu.
“There are less cases here and less diversity of cases here than in other jurisdictions,” he said. “Much has not been tested yet.”
But that could soon change, some experts say, in part thanks to Mathur. v. Ontario , a landmark 2024 ruling that established climate change impacts could violate Canadians’ human rights under Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The ruling was a watershed moment, adding legal ground under two ongoing climate litigation cases, which further link climate impacts to Charter rights.
In La Rose v. Canada , 15 children and youths have argued that Canada’s climate targe…
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