The ‘balance of convenience’ doctrine lets developers overturn injunctions once money is spent

Evidence

The Cree, Inuit, and Innu of the northern villages whose land and lifeways were at stake did not hear about the project until the planning was well underway. The Native community, led largely by the Crees of James Bay, mounted an aggressive campaign to head off the project. After six months of testimony concerning the cultural and environmental impact of the project, in March of 1975, James Bay I was halted by a court injunction. A week later, the Quebec Court of Appeals overturned the lower court ruling, largely on the premise that too much money had already been spent on the project to abort it. The “balance of convenience,” according to Hydro- Quebec and the government, rested in favor of continued development. That argument has been the bane of many northern development projects. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations, 341

Categorization

• XREF: The balance-of-convenience reversal is an institutional mechanism — same terrain as the Legal Systems course on how formal rules favor entrenched developers.
• SEED: The ‘too much money already spent to abort’ argument is a recognizable pattern in environmental law; could anchor an eco-justice essay on how sunk cost defeats precaution.