David Gooderham

David Gooderham practiced law in Vancouver for thirty-five years in civil litigation. He was called to the Bar in British Columbia in 1975 and retired at the end of 2012. He attended the University of Toronto, taking an honours degree in economics and political science and an LLB from the University of Toronto Law School in 1970.  

For the past ten years, he has been examining the review processes and evidence the Federal Government has used to justify the authorization of pipeline approvals, offshore oil projects, and the ongoing expansion of Canada’s oil production in the context of climate change. With long experience in how expert evidence is used in the judicial process, and how it can be misused, he has documented the repeated failures and refusals by the government and its energy agency, the Canada Energy regulator (formerly known as the National Energy Board) to properly consider the available evidence of climate science and to assess the global emissions implications of  plans to continue increasing Canada’s oil production to 2030 and maintain high levels of production to 2040 and 2050.

His writings have included submissions to Environment Canada in June 2016 critiquing the draft report Review of Greenhous Gas Emissions Estimates for the TMX pipeline expansion and written and oral submissions to the Ministerial Panel for the Trans Mountain Pipeline in August 2016. More recently, in March 2022 he was invited to testify before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development regarding government subsidies to support CCUS deployment in the oil sands industry: his brief to the Parliamentary Committee is at  https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/ENVI/Brief/BR11670245/br-external/GooderhamDavid-e.pdf.

He was arrested in August 2018 after peacefully disobeying an injunction relating to the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and charged with criminal contempt of court. Together with co-accused science educator Jennifer Nathan, he raised the common law defence of necessity in a lengthy legal challenge that took two years to complete. The necessity defence was ultimately dismissed by three judges of the B.C. Court of Appeal in September 2020. He has written about the case: see Gooderham, David (2020) “The Defence of Necessity and Addressing Climate Change: A Canadian Case”, Public Law and Resources Review, Vol. 42, Article 9: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/plrlr/vol42/iss1/9/.