By Deborah Carr
I remember the day with unsettling clarity. Late summer, walking my elderly dog near the gypsum silos in Hillsborough—a place where she could still wander safely off leash. With her fading eyesight and hearing, I was grateful we’d trained her with hand signals. Usually, she trotted only a short distance ahead, checking frequently to ensure I was close by.
But that day, she did something she’d never done. She veered suddenly and plunged into a ditch of stagnant, fetid water—sludge that had seeped for decades from the rotting refuse pile left behind when a gypsum plant closed in the eighties. By the time she noticed my frantic gestures and scrambled out, she was covered. I rushed her to the nearest creek and waded in to wash her. Whether she ingested any, I’ll never know. Months later, following a period of escalating symptoms—muscle weakness, vomiting, seizures—we lost her. Only years afterward, when three dogs died after ingesting blue-green algae in the Wolastoq River, did I consider a connection.
I still walk those marshes. And I still ask why we’ve normalized this toxic inheritance. Don’t we have a right to a healthy place to live?
In New Brunswick, the answer is no.
We have environmental rules—the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Environment Act—but no legally enforceable environmental rights...no clear standing for residents in a court of law. No guarantee that government must do its part to protect our health.
That could change.
I remember the day with unsettling clarity. Late summer, walking my elderly dog near the gypsum silos in Hillsborough—a place where she could still wander safely off leash. With her fading eyesight and hearing, I was grateful we’d trained her with hand signals. Usually, she trotted only a short distance ahead, checking frequently to ensure I was close by.
But that day, she did something she’d never done. She veered suddenly and plunged into a ditch of stagnant, fetid water—sludge that had seeped for decades from the rotting refuse pile left behind when a gypsum plant closed in the eighties. By the time she noticed my frantic gestures and scrambled out, she was covered. I rushed her to the nearest creek and waded in to wash her. Whether she ingested any, I’ll never know. Months later, following a period of escalating symptoms—muscle weakness, vomiting, seizures—we lost her. Only years afterward, when three dogs died after ingesting blue-green algae in the Wolastoq River, did I consider a connection.
I still walk those marshes. And I still ask why we’ve normalized this toxic inheritance. Don’t we have a right to a healthy place to live?
In New Brunswick, the answer is no.
We have environmental rules—the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Environment Act—but no legally enforceable environmental rights...no clear standing for residents in a court of law. No guarantee that government must do its part to protect our health.
That could change.
The Provincial Legislature building + Supporters for Bill 23 gather with David Coon, Leader NB Green Party, after the bill is presented in the Legislature.
A Long Time Coming
On March 25, 2025, I sat in the Legislature visitor’s gallery as Green Party Leader, David Coon reintroduced Bill 23, An Act Respecting the Right to a Healthy Environment. It was a moving moment that reminded me that I’d first heard of the legislation more than a decade ago.
The idea actually took root in 2009, when parents and advocates started asking how they might protect children from industrial contaminants. They envisioned a process that would give ordinary people the ability to say: This is harming us. This is harming our children. This must stop.
Working with the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate and environmental lawyers in Ontario and Nova Scotia, they drafted a child-focused environmental bill of rights. It launched in 2014, but political interest was weak. Over the years, the bill was refined, strengthened, and is now supported by more than forty organizations.
It’s long overdue.
What Bill 23 Would Do
Bill 23 would enshrine the human right to a healthy environment in provincial law. It would:
It doesn’t eliminate conflict, but it changes the terrain—from citizen-led protests and roadside blockades to a level legal field where every New Brunswicker has recourse.
Why It Matters
New Brunswick’s history is full of communities left unprotected.
Belledune is the starkest example. For decades, a lead smelter released lead, cadmium, arsenic and other metals into the environment. Residents complained of illness, some died of preventable disease, scientists warned of danger. Yet officials resisted linking the pollution to poor health. Even when marine life and garden produce showed high contamination, government insisted levels were not high enough to cause harm.
A 2005 health study finally confirmed the area had elevated cancer rates, and soil testing proved dangerous lead levels: five times the safe limit for children. Still, change came far too slowly. The smelter closed in 2019, due economic reasons, after nearly 60 years of pollution.
Bill 23 is the tool Belledune never had.
More recently, residents near the Coastal Shell Products plant in Richibucto endured years of noxious odours, headaches, and nausea. Hundreds of complaints, protests, petitions, inspections, equipment upgrades—yet the stench persisted. Regulatory tools existed, but residents were never truly protected. Some initiated their own lawsuits. The plant shut down only after declaring bankruptcy in 2024.
And during the shale gas protests of 2012–14, communities argued that fracking threatened health, water, land, and Indigenous rights. Valid concerns were framed as political opposition rather than basic human rights. Communities had to fundraise for years to pursue legal action.
(As an aside, just this week, public health experts in British Columbia called for an independent study of oil and gas impacts on health, warning of cumulative harms to air, water, and future generations. As Dr. Tim Takaro of Simon Fraser University stated in the CBC article, “If we really accounted for all of those health effects… this industry would have been shut down a long time ago.”)
And I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the increased reports of neurological illnesses in New Brunswick. Years later, we’re still no closer to discovering the causes.
What About the Economy?
It’s a fair question, and one that often surfaces whenever environmental rights are discussed. Yet the global evidence is clear: countries that have legally recognized the right to a healthy and sustainable environment—now more than 160 nations, along with the United Nations—have not watched their economies collapse. They’ve watched them evolve.
Environmental rights tend to shift economies toward greener growth models, higher compliance standards, and increased investment in clean technology and infrastructure. Rather than stalling progress, these laws often spark innovation, pushing industries to adopt more efficient, less polluting technologies, while creating new jobs in renewable energy, sustainable farming, and tourism.
How can we afford it?
How can we not. NB Lung notes one in five of us lives with lung disease, worsened by pollution and climate change. Researchers and advocates have also raised repeated alarms about glyphosate and other contaminants showing up in our bodies and waterways, with links to neurological and chronic illnesses.
We pay the price for pollution with higher healthcare and insurance costs, workplace absences, expensive land and water reclamations. Prevention saves money across our healthcare, personal finances and infrastructure, while strengthening our workforce.
Some opponents warn of job losses, yet we’ve already watched hundreds of mill and mine jobs disappear due to market shifts—long before anyone proposed a legal right to a healthy environment. Too often, our communities are left with the environmental damage and the cleanup costs. We know our local economies are strongest when they’re built on a diverse mix of small and medium-sized businesses, rather than dependence upon a single large employer whose departure brings serious consequences.
Farmers, loggers, and property owners are already facing mounting financial risks as climate impacts accelerate. Bill 23 would require government to plan ahead for floods, storms, wildfires, and heat waves instead of reacting only after the damage is done.
An environmental rights bill doesn’t hinder prosperity—it shifts the focus from industries with the most to gain to the people with the most to lose.
Changing the Story
Our past tells one story. Beyond Belledune, Richibucto, the fracking protests, cancers and neurological diseases already mentioned—and countless others just like them—a 2022 Auditor General report revealed a backlog of more than 1,000 contaminated sites, many left open for over a decade. The area around the gypsum silos—where I still walk—is one of them.
Despite the hidden contamination, the landscape remains beautiful: community-built wetland ponds, cattails, wildlife and trails, with the towering silos standing like sentinels. They remind us of the many jobs that industry once brought, but also the mess it left behind and the community efforts to restore it.
We can stay in this story, or we can write a different one.
A story where every New Brunswicker has a recognized right to a healthy environment. A Commissioner to back them up. And the ability to ask a court to step in when government will not.
In the long run, rural economies can only thrive where the rivers are clean, the air is breathable, the marshes support life, and our children can grow into healthy adults. That’s how we keep real businesses and real families here for the next generation.
Choosing the Future
On March 26, 2026, MLAs will choose which story New Brunswick will live in when they vote on Bill 23. Please write to your MLA and implore them to vote YES—for our children, our communities, and the generations who will inherit the land we leave behind.
Because every New Brunswicker deserves more than rules. We deserve rights. And a future where the marshes are simply marshes again. Where the water is just water. Where both the wildlife and creatures we love can wander safely, and so can we.
Bio: Deborah Carr is a writer, author and environmental activist whose work explores the deep connections between people and place. She most often writes about nature, conservation, and human stories rooted in community.
On March 25, 2025, I sat in the Legislature visitor’s gallery as Green Party Leader, David Coon reintroduced Bill 23, An Act Respecting the Right to a Healthy Environment. It was a moving moment that reminded me that I’d first heard of the legislation more than a decade ago.
The idea actually took root in 2009, when parents and advocates started asking how they might protect children from industrial contaminants. They envisioned a process that would give ordinary people the ability to say: This is harming us. This is harming our children. This must stop.
Working with the Office of the Child and Youth Advocate and environmental lawyers in Ontario and Nova Scotia, they drafted a child-focused environmental bill of rights. It launched in 2014, but political interest was weak. Over the years, the bill was refined, strengthened, and is now supported by more than forty organizations.
It’s long overdue.
What Bill 23 Would Do
Bill 23 would enshrine the human right to a healthy environment in provincial law. It would:
- Require government to protect health, with special attention to children and vulnerable people
- Give any resident standing to go to court if that right is ignored
- Create an Environmental Rights Commissioner to investigate contamination
- Guarantee access to clean air, safe water, uncontaminated food, information about pollutants, and meaningful participation in decisions
It doesn’t eliminate conflict, but it changes the terrain—from citizen-led protests and roadside blockades to a level legal field where every New Brunswicker has recourse.
Why It Matters
New Brunswick’s history is full of communities left unprotected.
Belledune is the starkest example. For decades, a lead smelter released lead, cadmium, arsenic and other metals into the environment. Residents complained of illness, some died of preventable disease, scientists warned of danger. Yet officials resisted linking the pollution to poor health. Even when marine life and garden produce showed high contamination, government insisted levels were not high enough to cause harm.
A 2005 health study finally confirmed the area had elevated cancer rates, and soil testing proved dangerous lead levels: five times the safe limit for children. Still, change came far too slowly. The smelter closed in 2019, due economic reasons, after nearly 60 years of pollution.
Bill 23 is the tool Belledune never had.
More recently, residents near the Coastal Shell Products plant in Richibucto endured years of noxious odours, headaches, and nausea. Hundreds of complaints, protests, petitions, inspections, equipment upgrades—yet the stench persisted. Regulatory tools existed, but residents were never truly protected. Some initiated their own lawsuits. The plant shut down only after declaring bankruptcy in 2024.
And during the shale gas protests of 2012–14, communities argued that fracking threatened health, water, land, and Indigenous rights. Valid concerns were framed as political opposition rather than basic human rights. Communities had to fundraise for years to pursue legal action.
(As an aside, just this week, public health experts in British Columbia called for an independent study of oil and gas impacts on health, warning of cumulative harms to air, water, and future generations. As Dr. Tim Takaro of Simon Fraser University stated in the CBC article, “If we really accounted for all of those health effects… this industry would have been shut down a long time ago.”)
And I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the increased reports of neurological illnesses in New Brunswick. Years later, we’re still no closer to discovering the causes.
What About the Economy?
It’s a fair question, and one that often surfaces whenever environmental rights are discussed. Yet the global evidence is clear: countries that have legally recognized the right to a healthy and sustainable environment—now more than 160 nations, along with the United Nations—have not watched their economies collapse. They’ve watched them evolve.
Environmental rights tend to shift economies toward greener growth models, higher compliance standards, and increased investment in clean technology and infrastructure. Rather than stalling progress, these laws often spark innovation, pushing industries to adopt more efficient, less polluting technologies, while creating new jobs in renewable energy, sustainable farming, and tourism.
How can we afford it?
How can we not. NB Lung notes one in five of us lives with lung disease, worsened by pollution and climate change. Researchers and advocates have also raised repeated alarms about glyphosate and other contaminants showing up in our bodies and waterways, with links to neurological and chronic illnesses.
We pay the price for pollution with higher healthcare and insurance costs, workplace absences, expensive land and water reclamations. Prevention saves money across our healthcare, personal finances and infrastructure, while strengthening our workforce.
Some opponents warn of job losses, yet we’ve already watched hundreds of mill and mine jobs disappear due to market shifts—long before anyone proposed a legal right to a healthy environment. Too often, our communities are left with the environmental damage and the cleanup costs. We know our local economies are strongest when they’re built on a diverse mix of small and medium-sized businesses, rather than dependence upon a single large employer whose departure brings serious consequences.
Farmers, loggers, and property owners are already facing mounting financial risks as climate impacts accelerate. Bill 23 would require government to plan ahead for floods, storms, wildfires, and heat waves instead of reacting only after the damage is done.
An environmental rights bill doesn’t hinder prosperity—it shifts the focus from industries with the most to gain to the people with the most to lose.
Changing the Story
Our past tells one story. Beyond Belledune, Richibucto, the fracking protests, cancers and neurological diseases already mentioned—and countless others just like them—a 2022 Auditor General report revealed a backlog of more than 1,000 contaminated sites, many left open for over a decade. The area around the gypsum silos—where I still walk—is one of them.
Despite the hidden contamination, the landscape remains beautiful: community-built wetland ponds, cattails, wildlife and trails, with the towering silos standing like sentinels. They remind us of the many jobs that industry once brought, but also the mess it left behind and the community efforts to restore it.
We can stay in this story, or we can write a different one.
A story where every New Brunswicker has a recognized right to a healthy environment. A Commissioner to back them up. And the ability to ask a court to step in when government will not.
In the long run, rural economies can only thrive where the rivers are clean, the air is breathable, the marshes support life, and our children can grow into healthy adults. That’s how we keep real businesses and real families here for the next generation.
Choosing the Future
On March 26, 2026, MLAs will choose which story New Brunswick will live in when they vote on Bill 23. Please write to your MLA and implore them to vote YES—for our children, our communities, and the generations who will inherit the land we leave behind.
Because every New Brunswicker deserves more than rules. We deserve rights. And a future where the marshes are simply marshes again. Where the water is just water. Where both the wildlife and creatures we love can wander safely, and so can we.
Bio: Deborah Carr is a writer, author and environmental activist whose work explores the deep connections between people and place. She most often writes about nature, conservation, and human stories rooted in community.
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