Dismiss with costs

Vincent J. Curtis

24 Dec 24

RE: Ontario asks court to hear youth-led climate case. The Canadian Press; published in the Hamilton Spectator 24 Dec 24.

Canada has the Notwithstanding Clause to make sure of parliamentary supremacy, and that the courts don’t have the final say, as they do in the United States.  It is therefore strange for Ontario to ask the Supreme Court to hear a case, brought allegedly by “young people” but in fact funded by activists, to challenge Ontario’s so-called “climate plan.”

The case alleges that the Charter provision for their right to life is violated by Ontario’s emissions targets. The case would require the court to decide what Ontario’s emission targets ought to be.  While the court could make this decision, the rationale would be arbitrary, and it would open to the door to all sorts of other challenges to government policies based on some theory of personal endangerment. The construction of Highway 413 could be challenged, for example, both for and against construction based on some theory of general endangerment to life from traffic flow.

But there is no science backing the claim of these youths.  Their theory would hold that their lives would be endangered if they moved to Florida or to Hawaii, due to the warmer climate of those places; and this in itself ought to falsify the endangerment claim.  A second definitive disproof is Ontario’s contribution to climate change, insofar as any can be shown at all, is dwarfed by the contributions of the rest of the world. It is simply implausible to claim that Ontario’s action, or lack thereof, endangers the lives of these “youths” in any provable way.

Case dismissed; plaintiffs pay costs!

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