Focus on Legal Aspects of Sustainability

Written By Radha D. Curpen, and Christopher Somerville

As business moves to incorporate sustainability into a central position in its planning and operations, our early focus at Bennett Jones on the legal aspects of that concept offers significant advantages to our clients. Our leading positions in dealing with environmental management, climate change, health and safety, aboriginal issues and corporate governance and our deep understanding of employment, community involvement and related social issues enabled us to see the need to integrate those disciplines and use our legal analysis of them in assisting our clients to appropriately deploy sustainability concepts throughout their organizations. Recently we have joined others in a number of sustainability initiatives that we want to bring to your attention.

First, in our ongoing commitment to support education and best practices for sustainability, our partner Gray Taylor will join with members of the University of Waterloo's School of Environment, Enterprise and Development to present “Sustainable Development: Value Creation and Due Diligence Protection” on Thursday, October 14, 2010 from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm at The Marriott Toronto Downtown/Eaton Centre Hotel. This timely seminar will provide participants with the understanding and tools to effectively:

• identify the relationship between sustainable development performance and financial indicators,
• understand the sustainable development issues that frequently damage business value and those that create opportunities for new value creation,
• lever legal principles in implementing risk reduction strategies involving “sustainability management systems”.

Also, on October 18, 2010, our partner Radha Curpen will participate on a panel at the I.E. Canada annual conference entitled “Looking Beyond the Obvious” at the Delta Meadowvale Hotel in Mississauga, Ontario. Radha will address the issue of sustainability and the law in the context of the importing and exporting that forms the core of the business of many of the members of I.E. Canada.

In addition, Gray Taylor, Radha Curpen and Chris Somerville (one of our students-at-law) recently reviewed and provided comments on the first draft of a proposed standard distributed by the Underwriters Laboratories Association which is designed to permit the rating of manufacturing businesses on their sustainability performance. The draft standard is ULE 880, Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations. Further information is available at:

http://www.ulenvironment.com/ulenvironment/eng/pages/offerings/standards/organizations/ and our comments can be reviewed at: http://www.bennettjones.com/docs/ULE880Comments_BJ.pdf