For one of them, unprecedented wildfires in her home province sometimes made it difficult to breathe. Another has experienced heat waves, ice storms and flooding.

But the four teenagers suing the Government of Canada for approving the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion all say the psychological effects of climate change have been more damaging than the physical ones.

“I definitely also feel fear. Including myself, there are many youth in Canada who have decided not to have kids when they’re older because they don’t want to bring kids into a world that’s so messed up,” says Rebecca Wolf Gage, 13.

“We want a future,” says Lena Andres, 18. Older people “had the privilege of growing up and not having to worry about the ground beneath their feet crumbling. All I want is to feel the same way.”

Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada quashed British Columbia’s pipeline-related appeal, removing a major barrier to the controversial energy project. It would almost triple the capacity of the existing pipeline to carry diluted bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands to the B.C. coast for export overseas.

These four young people and their legal challenge are one of the pipeline’s last remaining obstacles, along with challenges mounted by several First Nations.

“I can’t just sit back and watch this happen. I need to always be doing something, and if that means that I have to sue my prime minister, then I guess that’s what I have to do,” says Andres.

The teenagers — Wolf Gage, from Victoria; Andres, from Winnipeg; Nina Tran, 19, from Hamilton; and Olivier Adkin-Kaya, 18, of Edmonton — are arguing that the federal government failed to consider their rights as young people when it approved and bought the Trans Mountain expansion project. The Liberal government purchased the pipeline for $4.5 billion in 2018, aiming to get it built.

Because the new pipeline will add double-digit megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, contributing to the environmental degradation wrought by climate change, the youth say Canada should not have approved it without considering whether doing so will violate their rights to life, liberty, and security of the person — particularly because they stand to suffer more harm from climate change than older people, who won’t live to see the worst of it.

After a federal court dismissed the challenge on procedural grounds last fall, the group raised more than $19,000 through crowdfunding and in November applied for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The case faces long odds.

The Supreme Court granted just 8 per cent of the applications for leave to appeal that it received in 2018. Even if the justices do decide to hear it, the challenge relies on a section of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms that is typically used in criminal matters — there is no obvious precedent for using it as redress for environmental injustice.

Last week, a U.S. federal appeals court dismissed a similar youth-led case, Juliana vs. United States, concluding “reluctantly” that climate change policy is a matter for governments, not for courts.

But in December, Netherland’s top court upheld a landmark decision that ordered the Dutch government to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent by the end of 2020, affirming a lower court’s ruling that the government has a human rights obligation to protect its citizens from the ills of climate change. Nine young Germans launched a similar lawsuit against their government this month.

These cases are “just the tip of the iceberg,” says Patrick Canning, a B.C.-based lawyer representing the Canadian teenagers.

“Climate litigation is only going to increase, and the court has an opportunity with this case to set some of the ground rules and give guidance to provincial courts for how to deal with these issues.”

The teenagers connected through a national network of climate strikers, young people who are protesting inaction on global warming by leaving school to picket legislatures and other institutions.

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On top of her activism, Wolf Gage had also being searching for legal options. Her father is an environmental lawyer.

“I begged my dad for months to figure out a way to stop the pipeline,” says Wolf Gage, who witnessed weeks of smoky air and orange skies during B.C.’s record-breaking 2017 wildfire season. She says she suffers from some eco-anxiety, and occasionally sees a counsellor for it.

Their strategy is to rely on sections 7 and 15 of the Charter. The former dictates that everyone has the right to “life, liberty and security of the person” — in many ways, the most basic and fundamental protection of all, lawyer Canning says — and the latter stipulates that everyone benefits from equal protection under the law, without discrimination based on age or any other factor.

Thirteen-year-old Wolf Gage summarizes hundreds of pages of legal filings concisely:

“If our future is being destroyed, and we have the right to life, liberty and security of the person, and we have the same equal rights as adults, then they shouldn’t build the pipeline.”

Last June, the four youth and three others sent submissions based on that argument to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal cabinet, urging the government not to reapprove the pipeline (Ottawa’s first approval was thrown out by a court for insufficient Indigenous consultation and inadequate consideration of environmental impacts.)

Days later, Trudeau announced that the pipeline had been approved again.

“We were like, OK, are we going to sue them?” Wolf Gage remembers. The answer was yes.

The teenagers applied to the Federal Court of Appeal for leave to review cabinet’s approval. But in September, Justice David Stratas dismissed their application. Stratas wrote that there was “no evidence” supporting the applicants’ Charter claims, but primarily threw it out because it wasn’t part of an original challenge filed at an earlier stage of the process.

“I was 12 years old when that happened. It’s not like I could have done that — I didn’t have the resources to do that, I didn’t know. When you’re a kid, you assume that the people who are in power are the ones who are looking out for you,” says Andres.

“Everybody in my generation has had to grow up very quickly, and kind of miss out on that portion of their childhood, where they feel safe and protected. We’re the ones protecting ourselves at this point, because people in power aren’t doing it.”

As they wait to hear whether the Supreme Court will take their case, the teens all express an obligation to do everything in their power to spur action on climate change.

“We’re putting friendships on hold, we’re putting school on hold, literally everything on hold in order to sue our government. We shouldn’t have to do this. It’s ridiculous that I have to do this,” says Andres.

“One day I’d like to grow up and I’d like to have kids and not feel badly about bringing them into a world that has been so degraded. I’d like them to be safe, I’d like them to be happy. I don’t want them to have to worry about the state of the planet.”

She adds: ‘I’m not doing this because I want to. I’m doing this because I have to.”

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