9 min. readLast summer, Lauren Wright was planting lentils in a field outside of Saskatoon. The air was thick with wildfire smoke and, as temperatures climbed, a co-worker was hit with a sudden asthma attack.
Rushing to the truck for an inhaler, Wright remembers fighting blurred vision, their head pounding from the smoke exposure. The episode is etched in Wright’s memory — not for the sudden moment of panic, but as a lasting reminder that summer life on the Prairies had morphed into something both unfamiliar and dangerous.
Summary
Both of Wright’s parents were raised in northern Saskatchewan, their father on a farm and their mother in a small town. While Wright was the first in the family to grow up in the city, they spent much of their childhood canoeing, fishing and working the family farm during harvest.
A multi-year drought dropped water levels on the river where they used to fish and canoe. Some summers, extreme heat would make it nearly impossible to play sports or go on camping trips. Drought sunk crop yields. Then the wildfires came, and with them, forests burned and smoke filled the air.
“I really started to understand, you know, what was going on in my city, my country and how climate change was very much a current reality rather than a distant future problem,” Wright said.
“It’s really a culmination in the change of my way of life, the way of life that my family has lived for so many generations.”
The 22-year-old is among 15 young Canadians whose experiences with heat waves, floods and wildfires form the backbone of a legal case that has wended its way through federal court since 2019. After a series of appeals and amended pleadings, the landmark constitutional challenge — known as La Rose vs. His Majesty the King — will finally be heard at a federal courthouse in Vancouver starting Oct. 26.
Over a four-week trial, lawyers and multiple experts are expected to submit evidence that the federal government’s Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act — which legally binds Canada to absorb as much carbon pollution as it emits by 2050 — is not ambitious enough, and so violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The court challenge claims the government’s plan to curb emissions is not in line with the best available science. As a result, the plaintiffs claim it fails to safeguard the life, liberty and security of Canadians, a direct breach of Section 7 of the Charter.
Plaintiffs hope a win would take the politics out of climate policy
Canada’s climate is already warming nearly twice as fast as the global average. Canada could see 5 C of warming by the end of the century if governments around the world do not pursue emissions reduction with more effort than laid out in current climate policies, warned federal scientists in September.
The claim warns of a continued rise in heat-related illnesses, life-threatening diseases, allergies, asthma, exposure to dangerous pollutants and death. As permafrost melts, shorelines destabilize and rivers run dry, ecosystems will suffer, leading to severe consequences — both for spending on public infrastructure and the livelihoods of Indigenous communities who rely on fishing and hunting, according to the claim.
Children are already at higher risk from heat and smoke, and the court challenge emphasizes they will disproportionately suffer in a world where climate-driven disasters become more common and more extreme.
The plaintiffs, who hail from nearly every corner of Canada, have already seen the destructive power of water and fire tear into the places they call home.
At 21, Haana Edenshaw of the Haida Nation Tsitts Gitanee clan has witnessed sea-level rise damage her family home on Haida Gwaii.
In 2018, wildfire destroyed Montay Jesse Beaubien-Day’s home in Telegraph Creek, B.C. Today, climate change has limited his Wet’suwet’en and Tahltan families from harvesting wild food like salmon, moose and berries. Multiple studies have shown those food sources have also been impacted by everything from fishing and logging to the exploration and extraction of gas.
Further north, Kira Young and her family were among 20,000 people evacuated from Yellowknife when fire threatened the territorial capital in 2023. Court documents describe ash falling from an orange sky and fires burning alongside the highway as they fled.
Abandoning home is a familiar feeling for Sadie Vipond, who in 2013 was evacuated to higher ground when the Bow River flooded her neighbourhood in Calgary.
“I was only seven years old at the time. I had to be woken up by my grandmother and told we had to evacuate,” she told The Narwhal. “I was really scared for my home and family.”
The plaintiffs’ individual experiences will inform a multi-pronged argument, one that claims Canada’s Net-Zero Act “sets targets and requires development of plans” but fails to require any reduction in carbon pollution.
Canada produces a fraction of total global emissions but has one of the highest per-capita emissions profiles in the world. It is also the world’s fourth largest producer of oil and gas.
The scale of carbon pollution coming from Canada could grow even more in the coming years as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government seeks to fast-track several new fossil fuel export projects. That includes a clutch of major liquefied natural gas terminals, as well as the Pacific Link oil pipeline meant to boost bitumen shipments from Alberta’s oilsands to B.C.’s West Coast.
If the court sides with the plaintiffs, the federal government would need to re-write their net-zero policies to be in line with the Charter. The decision would not force the federal government to pursue a specific climate policy, but it would almost certainly challenge the notion that confronting climate change is a purely political question that can be bumped down Ottawa’s list of priorities, David Wu, one of the lead lawyers in the case, said.
“If there is a shift in the politics of the day, the government can’t just wave away its climate change commitments,” Wu told The Narwhal.
“It raises these broad constitutional questions about whether governments have an obligation to protect their citizens.”
Feds argue Canada has ‘little or no control’ over climate change
Federal lawyers pushed back against claims Canada has failed to fulfill its international climate obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement, whether through its Net-Zero Act or in collaboration with provinces.
In court documents, Ottawa contends the 15 young people have failed to establish a causal link between federal legislation and their alleged harms from climate change. Submissions from government lawyers state Canada’s plan to lower emissions is consistent with its international commitments, including the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Canada’s actions at the federal level have “little or no control over the ultimate impacts of globally-fuelled climate change,” the government claims.
Ottawa also argues the court lacks the “institutional competence” to evaluate the scientific, economic and political complexities of global climate change policy. It also ignores the separation of political and legal powers within Canada’s democratic system by attempting to have the courts weigh in on a government decision.
“It’s an argument we’re expecting,” Wu said. “We’re not asking the court to dictate climate policy.”
“What we’re asking the court to find [is] that Canada has infringed our clients’ rights, and they, the government, need to do better to ensure that those rights are protected.”
Both sides’ arguments have yet to be tested before a judge.
Vancouver trial to test international climate law
The La Rose trial is the latest in a wave of climate litigation supported by the non-profit Our Children’s Trust. Of the nearly 100 rights-based climate change cases currently being brought worldwide, about half are backed by the U.S.-based group, Kelly Matheson, the group’s deputy director of global strategy, said.
The organization has seen some success. One court challenge it supported in Hawaii led to a settlement which pushed the state to aggressively decarbonize its public transportation sector. And in 2024, the Montana Supreme Court sided with 16 young people who had sued the state for violating their right to a “clean and healthful environment” guaranteed under Montana’s Constitution.
What sets the Canadian case apart is that it is among the first in the world to make it to trial following a handful of major international rulings. Chief among those is a 2025 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice that found states have a general duty under international and human rights law to protect the world’s climate system for present and future generations.
Canada’s legal system is not bound by the international court’s ruling. But it can be used to inform judges’ interpretation of constitutional rights. One federal judge has already cited the case in ongoing litigation involving two Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs who challenged Ottawa over the full balance of carbon pollution produced by its policies.
“It’s so rare for these cases to go to trial,” Matheson said of the La Rose case. “It will have persuasive weight all over the world — in part because Canada is a big emitter.”
Elsewhere in Canada, seven young people led by Sudbury teenager Sophia Mathur sued the Ontario government in 2019 after the province clawed back its own climate targets.
And in June, Mathur joined two other young people to launch a parallel legal challenge against the federal government’s Net-Zero Act. That case, which has yet to go to trial, claims Ottawa abandoned or weakened its interim emission reductions plan, thereby failing to adhere to the 2050 plan.
The La Rose case makes a much broader claim, arguing the Net-Zero Act is weak enough on its own to be unconstitutional, said Andrew Gage, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law.
Whatever the outcome, many of the young plaintiffs will finally have their chance to tell their stories. When the case was first filed seven years ago, Wright was still in high school and struggled with the thought that they had the responsibility to represent the experiences of an entire generation. In the years since, Wright said they have found ways to be grounded in their own stories.
“I’m a good snapshot of life here in the Prairies,” the 22-year-old said. “I really have grown to see it as a privilege of being able to show people what is happening in the place that I love so much. And to tell them why it matters.”