Legacy Fund fights for environment on multiple fronts
If the Legacy Fund for the Environment wanted to inscribe a cake to celebrate its fifth anniversary this month, it might try: “Think globally, sue locally.”
The phrase would be a twist on a well-known expression, but it encapsulates the mission of the Montreal-based volunteer organization that supports and raises funds for citizen-initiated legal battles to save wetlands and green spaces.
“Our mission is to fund the legal defence of the environment,” founding member Campbell Stuart said this week, adding that the Legacy Fund obtained charitable status two years ago.
“We want to act locally. And we want to send a message that the cost of destroying the environment is going to go up because we’re not going to just choose one in a thousand cases to argue here. We’re going to take on as many as we possibly can.”
Stuart described his organization’s funding as “levelling the playing field” for citizens against private development interests that have deep pockets. While a large environmental organization that argues its own court cases might have to select a single case that it hopes will set a legal precedent, Stuart said the Legacy Fund doesn’t argue the cases it funds and isn’t too busy to support several causes at once.
Since it was launched in 2015, the Legacy Fund has supported four injunctions in court and is supporting four other causes that might end up there.
In each case, there’s a sense that municipal and provincial governments have failed to enforce their own laws, said Stuart, a lawyer and a former mayor of Montreal West. The injunctions so far have been handled by lawyers from his firm.
One of the developing cases is on the South Shore, he said, adding that the Legacy Fund is now looking to extend its reach off Montreal Island and even outside of Quebec.
A recent action supported by the Legacy Fund was a lawyer’s letter to Premier François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government in June demanding modifications to Bill 61, its proposed legislation to fast-track 202 infrastructure projects and relaunch the provincial economy following three months of pandemic-induced shutdown.
The bill, which has been put off until the fall session, would further dismantle environmental protections and is an infringement of Quebecers’ right to a healthy environment, the letter says.
And the group is on tenterhooks, Stuart said, as it awaits a judgment on an injunction brought by the Green Coalition in 2016 and funded by the Legacy Fund to undo construction on wetlands within the St-laurent Technoparc. The coalition argues that development went ahead without proper authorization and seeks to force the city of Montreal to remove roads and culverts that were built on a portion of the wetlands and to re-naturalize the area. The case was heard in February.
Even before receiving the judgment, Stuart said he believes the case sets a precedent because it was the first time he saw a Quebec judge agree to hear arguments on the quality of the environmental studies that were done to support a request to the Quebec environment department for authorization to build and on the quality of the department’s approval process.
Among other admissions, environment department employees testified in court they never refuse requests for permits and never carry out investigations, Stuart said.
“I think citizens take for granted that the government is doing its job and doing what it said it would do,” said Alison Hackney, a member of the board of the Legacy Fund.
“But in the case of environmental assessments, to protect the environment when projects are being built, I don’t think that’s the case. ... So I see the work of the Legacy Fund for the Environment as being absolutely essential.”
Hackney herself is duelling with the town council of Senneville over the fate of a triangular parcel of woods and wetlands where a zoning change to build condos was stymied in a town registry in 2018. The site is still zoned for seven houses. Hackney, backed by the Legacy Fund, is demanding Senneville rezone the site for conservation.
No case is too small or too local, Stuart said.
“We want to send a message to everybody that you may not get pushback from government,” he said, “but you may get pushback from citizens.”