Canadian Environmental Law Association

About Canadian Environmental Law Association

The Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) is a non-profit legal aid clinic in Toronto, funded by Legal Aid Ontario, that provides free legal help on environmental matters. It was founded in 1970, when a group of environmental activists, law professors, young lawyers, and articling students met in an unused laboratory at the University of Toronto and formed what they first called the Environmental Law Association. The word Canadian was added to the name a few years later. The clinic operated on precarious, pilot-style funding through the 1970s before Legal Aid Ontario recognized it as a permanent specialty legal clinic in 1978, letting it hire lasting staff and keep dedicated office space.

CELA represents low income, vulnerable, and Indigenous communities before courts, tribunals, and inquiries on issues like air and water pollution, drinking water, and contaminated sites, and offers brief environmental justice advice to others regardless of income. It also runs public legal education and pushes for law reform. As one of the original legal aid clinics in Ontario, it helped spur the later creation of sister organizations including West Coast Environmental Law and East Coast Environmental Law. Today the clinic's team includes lawyers, paralegals, and researchers, and it operates as part of the province's Co-operative of Specialty Community Legal Clinics of Ontario.