Should a healthy environment be a human right?

The simple act of breathing is resulting in the deaths of 7 million people worldwide

Canada is facing a “two for one” opportunity to benefit human health and help fight climate change by recognizing our basic right to a healthy environment within the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.

On Monday, the federal government responded to one of the largest environmental parliamentary e-petitions ever, with more than 11,000 signatories, that I initiated and Liberal MP Deborah Schulte sponsored. The petition asks for the recognition in law of the basic human right to a healthy environment for all Canadians. The government’s response stated that “recognizing a right to a healthy environment in federal law would represent a significant shift in how the Government of Canada conducts its health and environmental protection operations and the Government is conducting further study and analysis in order to understand the implications of this recommendation.”

When people learn about Blue Dot, a national grassroots movement for environmental rights, many of them ask: “But don’t we already have that right?” It may surprise you, as it did me, to learn that Canada is lagging behind. Some 150 nations have recognized their citizens’ legal right to a healthy environment as a basic human right.

What does that mean? Environmental rights are based on the simple yet powerful belief that everyone has the right to clean air and clean water.

We are facing an urgent global need to reduce air pollution. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, reports that the simple act of breathing is killing seven million people a year and harming billions more. Health Canada has indicated that this figure is more than 14,400 in Canada alone. The WHO director says: “A clean and healthy environment is the single most important precondition for ensuring good health. By cleaning up the air we breathe, we can prevent or at least reduce some of the greatest health risks.”

You might think that climate change is the most pressing environmental issue right now. Indeed, we urgently need to act on “rapid and far reaching” transitions to fight climate change, according to the findings of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The good news is that supporting the right to a healthy environment for everyone in Canada would also help us fight climate change. Environmental rights would help us transition to clean energy sources, decarbonize our methods of transportation and put a price on pollution.

My fervent hope is that when the Government of Canada conducts its further analysis, its action will be to enshrine the right to clean air and clean water in law as a basic human right for all Canadians.

Meanwhile, we as individuals have a crucial role to play in this movement. I hope you’ll join us in asking all members of Parliament to show their support by signing Blue Dot’s MP pledge for environmental rights. It is our responsibility, for ourselves and for future generations, to act now to realize the “two for one” benefit of updating the Canadian Environmental Protection Act with the right to a healthy environment to both protect our health and to help fight climate.