Policy Brief: Community Feedback in Response to the Draft Implementation Framework for the Right to a Healthy Environment

Authors: Anna Huschka (she/her), Manvi Bhalla (she/her), Megan Devoe (she/her), Zeina Seaifan (she/her)

Editors: Elaine Li (she/her), Mei-Ling Patterson (she/her) 

About the Right to the Healthy Environment Under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act: 

2023 amendments to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act included that “every individual in Canada has a right to a healthy environment” (1). As a part of this, the federal government has until June 2025 to publish an Implementation Framework that they will use to guide how they will include the right in decision-making and implementation of CEPA (1). In order to shape the Implementation Framework, the federal government released a discussion document in April 2024 (you can read our feedback on it here, as well as the Women’s Healthy Environment Network’s Feedback here). In October 2024, the federal government published a Draft Implementation Framework, and collected feedback from the public until December 4th, 2024, feedback that will be used to shape the final framework in June 2025.

About our Collaboration and the Community Feedback Report:

Funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Trottier Family Foundation, Shake Up The Establishment collaborated with the Women’s Healthy Environments Network and Finance Engage Sustain to host six consultations events and create an online survey to collect input from youth across so-called Canada. On December 4th, 2024 we collectively submitted a technical feedback report on the federal government’s Draft Framework, and this is the second report with the feedback we collected from the events and survey!

The Recommendations:

The following recommendations are from the Community in regards to the Draft Implementation Framework: 

1. Increase investments in programs to support youth mental health initiatives, particularly ones which help to strengthen connections between individuals, their communities and natural spaces around them. 
2. Ensure that environmental justice is advanced throughout all of this work in tangible ways, with there being accountability to make meaningful progress, alongside mechanisms for the public to provide feedback on an ongoing basis to continue to help collaboratively design policies that meet the health needs of minoritized, marginalized and structurally-vulnerable populations.
3. Provide reliable and accessible communications to the public to inform them of environmental health risks and mitigation strategies, and continue to work on proactive regulations to protect their health upstream.
4. Provide reparations as part of remediation processes for communities exposed to environmental hazards, and increase financial investments into community-led solutions to build agency and climate resiliency.
5. Create a more detailed and quantifiable definition of intergenerational equity, including:
   • Explicitly define what each generations’ needs are, and how these are weighed as part of environmental decision-making today;
   • Ensure that the needs of future generations are favoured over the needs of the present generation because of the lack of power that future generations have in changing course to prevent the establishment of potential intergenerational environmental health harms; and,
   • Broaden the definition of intergenerational equity to include non-human entities.
6. Avoid neutral or watered-down language across the Framework as it downplays urgency, can be misinterpreted and prevents enforceability and accountability for lack of progress.
7. Increase the accessibility of communications to help dedicatedly reach more newcomer communities, seniors, and racially, ethnically and linguistically-minoritized communities.
8. Increase the number of consultation opportunities, and ensure that they are inclusive of all communities, but that they are made most accessible to those disproportionately impacted to differential/cumulative environmental harms.
9. Increase support for citizen science initiatives, community-led data collection and ownership, and the collection of environmental health data that factors in the impacts of race, ethnicity, age, gender, sex, disability and immigration status to help make transparent critical gaps in environmental & health policies and services. 
10. Increase public access to trustworthy sources of information, and work on broader initiatives to increase trust in government initiatives, programs and services. 
11. Implement further measures to ensure polluters and corporations are held responsible for environmental harm.
12. Develop, define and enforce clear accountability measures for the government to uphold environmental commitments.
13. Center Indigenous decision-making and address injustices faced by underserved communities in environmental governance.
14. In the next revision cycle, work to expand the Right beyond CEPA, to apply to other federal policies, as well as clarify the impacts upon provincial, territorial, and municipal mandates for the development of politics in their jurisdictions. 
15. Phase out fossil fuels to ensure that the Right is upheld, and take a whole-of-government approach to align Canada’s environmental justice and climate action strategies, frameworks and commitments to advance health equity.