Liberal Pablo Rodriguez is one of a handful of MPs to have tabled a private members bill in the House of Commons and watched it become the law of the land. So it was, though, with Rodriguez's C-288, the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act which received Royal Assent on June 22, 2007.
That bill required, among other things, that the Minister of the Environment to do the following:
9. (1) Within 120 days after this Act comes into force, the Minister shall prepare a statement setting out the greenhouse gas emission reductions that are reasonably expected to result for each year up to and including 2012..
The Friends of the Earth — and many others, I should add — believe that the Minister of the Environment, John Baird, has not done what the KPIA required and has broken the law of the land by failing to do so. And so yesterday — 159 days after the KPIA received Royal Assent — The Friends of the Earth filed a lawsuit in the Federal Court of Canada asking for a judicial review of the conduct of Baird and cabinet. The ultimate goal for FoE would to have a judge issue a court order stipulating that the governnment obey the directives in the KPIA.
You can review the FoE brief filed with the court here (PDF).
Baird, incidentally, appears today before the House of Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development where the Committee expects him to outline the government's intentions with regards to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali next week. The world's governments are expected to use that meeting to lay the framework for a treaty that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol when that expires in 2012.