Influencers in Toronto: Spotlight on Jennifer King

Adam: Welcome, everyone. My name's Adam Chamberlain and I'm here to chat with my colleague and partner, Jennifer King, in the environmental practice in Toronto's office of Gowling WLG. So first of all, welcome, Jennifer. How are you today?

Jennifer: Hi. Great. Thanks so much, Adam. How are you?

Adam: Good. I'm just curious, first of all, how you came to be an environmental lawyer?

Jennifer: I started my career doing general civil litigation and when I joined the environmental law group at Gowling, that was when I became an environmental lawyer, specifically. What I love about the practice of environmental law is how diverse it is. So my practice right now runs the gamut. I am working on some constitutional cases, and some regulatory work, and really right across Canada.

Adam: How has the trend towards, and the issues surrounding ESG, how's that impacted your practice?

Jennifer: Since I've been an environmental lawyer, exclusively, I have been working in the ESG space. So environmental, social, governance is a topic that we hear a lot about in the last couple of years, and particularly, I was lucky enough to be involved in the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act references, which we argued before the Supreme Court in September, and the decision just came out just over a month ago. That issue, the issue of carbon pricing and how we address and regulate greenhouse gas emissions, is again something that as environmental lawyers we've been dealing with as part of our practice for many years, but is just really becoming more understood right across law, right across business and our clients our understanding that regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is here to stay and that, in fact, there's a lot of opportunities for our clients to really take advantage of.

Adam: I'm just curious how this pandemic has impacted your practice as an environmental lawyer?

Jennifer: Really it's had such an impact on our practices but it's more had an impact I think, Adam, on how we practice. Not really the content of it but the logistics of it. I'm very much looking forward to being back in the office and be able to go places in person.

Adam: I'm curious, generally speaking, how you've managed during the pandemic and perhaps maybe you could tell us what you think the high points, and let's stick with the high points, about the pandemic?

Jennifer: There have been a high points working during the pandemic. I think that there has been an ability to connect with people as we've gotten more comfortable with this format. Something that we really didn't do before. Like many of my clients, I'm working from home. I have a partner who's also working from home. I have kids who are at home and while that's been a real challenge, as you know, there's been also opportunities to connect. So connect with my kids and connect with clients who are also going through a shared experience. So I think in our lifetimes this is a time when we really understand our challenges that we're all working through at the same time. While they differ there's a lot of commonality.

Adam: What kind of questions and concerns your clients have come to you with over that period of time?

Jennifer: So there's been a number of questions that have been arising around the pandemic and, as a litigator, that sometimes takes the form of how do we approach a piece of litigation when it is remote? In the context of the pandemic, what's urgent? There's just a whole other set of procedural issues that we have to think about as litigators right now. So I've been hearing about those. Also, when we're dealing with people and clients right across the country, there's just such different concerns and needs and challenges that we're facing. What we often see is that we see different kinds of challenges in the North and that's not unique to the pandemic, Adam, as you know. They face all sorts of challenges with respect to transportation and movement of goods. Right now, with the challenges of the pandemic, there are also issues with just gathering and making sure that people have an opportunity to participate in regulatory processes and consultation. So we get a lot of questions as well about the changing regulation around climate change and the different regulations around carbon pricing. Over the past 3 years we've seen constant change in regulation of carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions across the country. So at any given time the map of just carbon pricing regulations across Canada is changing. So when we have clients who operate in more than one Municipality, more than one Province, right across the country, they're facing different requirements and different regulations.

Adam: Thanks very much for your time and I really appreciate the chance to chat with you today.