Is Ottawa (the City) Quietly Quitting Its Climate Promises?

We owe it to future generations to do better.

How is the City of Ottawa performing on its climate commitments? According to the Citizen Climate Counsel, a group of citizens monitoring the City’s performance against its promises, pretty poorly.

But there is a more structural question we need to ask.

Is the City even trying to meet those commitments, or is Council quietly quitting on its climate promises?

Excellent Plan on Paper

The City of Ottawa has a rigorous Climate Change Master Plan. And we have an excellent Energy Evolution plan to phase out carbon emissions. Energy Evolution outlines:

• How the residents and businesses of Ottawa (the “community”) can reach net zero emissions by 2050,

• How the direct operations of the City of Ottawa (the “corporation”) can reach net zero by 2040,

• What City Hall can do to catalyze those community emission reductions.
  

Enabling the community is critical

This catalytic work is important. In fact, it’s really a key action for the City if the region of Ottawa is to do its part in reducing emissions.

Community emissions amount to 96% of total emissions in Ottawa.

Phasing out the 4% corporate emissions has to happen, but City operations make only a modest contribution to meaningful climate action.

Furthermore, there are actions required by the municipality before community members can do their part. For example, it will be hard for many residents to transition to electric vehicles if there are not enough public charging stations on our streets.

This Council seems to be quietly abandoning its commitment to help get community emissions to net zero.

City leaders want to focus on their 4% and forgo any responsibility for the 96%. In other words, step back from their role as the Ottawa community leader on climate action.

Walking away from our commitments

Putting an end to City work to help reduce community emissions would be a serious concern.

• First, it’s saying that the City is no longer serious about our climate targets.

• Second, we’re saying that there is no role for City leadership in helping the people and organizations of Ottawa bring down their emissions. The community would be basically on their own in making the climate transition — even though residents need their local government to first provide some basic infrastructure and services that only they can provide.

Three recent actions raise the concern that the City is trying to walk away from our climate commitments.

1. Council’s stated priorities

The approved 2023-2026 Council priorities include “a city that is green and resilient”. But the specific strategic objective is to “Reduce emissions associated with the City’s operations and facilities”. There is nothing in those priorities related to catalyzing reductions in community emissions.

2. Community Climate Change Fund

In Dec 2021, Council directed staff to explore creating a new fund, a Community Climate Change Strategic Initiative. That fund would be explicitly geared to helping reduce community emissions.

That fund has been effectively put on hold as staff were unable to identify money from higher levels of government to support the fund. Council could provide seed funding to get this initiative up and running, but that has not been considered a budget priority.

3. 2024 Budget decision

The 2024 Budget includes $5m for dedicated climate action. (In fact, the city is planning a total of $278m in climate spending this year, including $180m for electric buses, as new climate disclosure reporting in the budget makes clear.)

During the budget debate, Councillors approved a walk-on motion about how this $5m is to be spent. Council decided that:

“staff be directed to fund projects that implement either the Corporate Actions outlined in Section 4 ‘Mitigation’ of the Climate Change Master Plan (CCMP) or Section 5 ‘Adaptation and Resilience’ of the CCMP, with a focus on the corporation”

That wording seems pretty clear that the $5m is to be used to reduce corporate emissions, or adapt City infrastructure to a changing climate, with no money to go to reducing community emissions. (Ecology Ottawa has done excellent analysis for those looking to do a deeper dive on this issue.)

Staff will return later this year with a prioritization framework for how that money is spent. Wouldn’t it make sense for that prioritization framework to simply prioritize whatever actions — corporate or community — yield the greatest reduction in emissions per dollar spent?

Is Council prepared to lead on climate?

This Council’s idea of climate leadership is to reduce its own corporate 4%-of-total emissions, and ignore its role in helping the community reduce its 96% share.

That’s not leadership. That’s an abrogation of responsibility.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll address some of the misinformation that is circulating about Ottawa’s climate plan. I’ll also follow up with specific suggestions for how a modest amount of funding to reduce community emissions can have a big pay off, in terms of cutting emissions and mobilizing additional funding from other levels of government.

If you are concerned about the City of Ottawa taking climate action now please share this post with other concerned friends and family.

The people of Ottawa deserves to know, and have a say, if City Council is quietly quitting its climate goals.