How Canadian municipalities approach
climate change
From states of emergency to community-minded guidelines
Ever since the town of Canmore declared a state of climate emergency in October 2019, surrounding communities and the province of Alberta at large have made little effort to acknowledge it, according to Mayor John Borrowman.
“In a way, it felt like we made a declaration and it just went out into the ether,” Borrowman says.
Canmore — population just under 14,000 and located an hour from Calgary — is punching above its weight on climate action in many respects. Its 2021 budget approved $1.15 million in capital projects meant to reduce the town’s carbon footprint, the equivalent of four per cent of tax revenue for the year. It hired a climate change specialist from Vancouver to develop these projects. A major solar installation is generating enough to offset 25 per cent of power to its largest building, the Elevation Place recreation facility.
As small of a response as Canmore’s decision garnered outside of the town, citizens have been vocal about the issue within its borders — particularly the dozens who are part of the Bow Valley Climate Action group, who communicate frequently with council.
“Canmore tends to be a very environmentally aware community. And, of course, our economy is not as directly tied to oil revenues as many other communities are in Alberta,” says Borrowman, adding that a healthy environment is critical to the tourism-based town.
“The work we’re doing is not only critical to the town of Canmore, but it should be critical to our whole society, and particularly smaller municipalities.”
The Town of Canmore's state of climate emergency was the most recent out of two municipalities in Alberta to take this step. At the time, Canmore Mayor John Borrowman invoked a 2018 United Nations report which called for all levels of government to act on climate change and wrote a letter to Premier Jason Kenney asking him to do the same. PHOTO: Raymond Wong/Flickr
Since January 2019, nearly 500 Canadian municipalities have declared a state of climate emergency. This includes 96 local governments across the country, as well as more than 400 councils in the province of Quebec that have joined a combined Declaration d’urgency Climatique. Just two Alberta municipalities are on this list: Canmore and Edmonton.
There is, however, debate on what is considered a declaration of climate emergency, according to Random Acts of Green, the Peterborough, Ont.-based social enterprise that compiled the list above. For example, the city of Guelph voted to “acknowledge a climate crisis,” while the Regional District of Central Kootenay in British Columbia declared a “climate action imperative,” rather than a climate emergency.
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“I think the benefit of approving or making a declaration is that it helps to put that issue at a higher level of awareness. Because we’ve made the declaration … a regular part of most every conversation is climate action,” says Borrowman.
“I know other provinces — like British Columbia, for instance — I believe there’s a good number of municipalities that have also made a declaration … but you know, Alberta has a different perspective on things.”
The Alberta factor
This perspective — the barriers to climate action in resource-based communities — is the thesis of new research by Seghan MacDonald, a master’s student in urban and regional planning at the University of Alberta. According to her, one of these barriers is the mental divide between fighting climate change and supporting the province’s oil and gas sector, making Albertans feel as though they must pick a side.
“That’s simply not true. We do need oil and gas. We haven’t all switched over to electric vehicles and solar power … we are going to need oil and gas into the future. But we also need to recognize that Alberta is the greatest, highest emitter in the country and that we do need to get those emissions under control,” she says.
“I think Calgary and Edmonton have … missed past goals of greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Not purposely missed them, but purposely been quite silent about it.”
Edmonton’s state of climate emergency was declared in August 2019. The city’s mayor, Don Iveson, said at the time that the declaration modifies goals that were initially set for the year 2050, now aiming to achieve them by 2030.
Edmonton was the first Alberta municipality to declare a climate emergency. The city has since worked to transition its fleet of vehicles to electric power and to upgrade its transit system technology, significantly revising its existing climate strategy. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons
By that year, citizens of Edmonton should only emit three tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, a more than 80 per cent reduction from their current average of 20 tonnes per year. The City of Calgary’s goal is an 80 per cent reduction of 2005-level emissions by 2050, the year by which Edmonton aims to be carbon neutral.
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Joe Vipond, co-chair of the Calgary Climate Hub, describes Edmonton’s climate plan as “more robust” than Calgary’s offering.
“Climate change is a global issue, but its impacts are very regionally diverse, and so every municipality is experiencing climate change differently, and they know how best to address those issues,” MacDonald says.
“Cities play a really important role when it comes to adapting to climate change and understanding what policies will be most effective in their community.”
MacDonald sees Calgary and Edmonton as having similar approaches to the climate crisis. While Calgary was selected as one of the 100 Resilient Cities by the Rockefeller Foundation — an initiative to help cities worldwide “become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century” — and Edmonton was not, both cities share high-level commitments without granular timelines to back them up.
“I think that declaration means that you hold yourself accountable, and you are, in every policy that you pass, considering climate change. Not just in your adaptation and energy transition policies, in … every development, you’re considering, what does this mean for climate change?” says MacDonald.
“You’re just not seeing that in Edmonton. I think it’s been very tokenistic in Edmonton. It’s been a declaration, but it has very little meaning.”
Vancouver's early buy-in
Vancouver was the first Canadian municipality to declare a climate emergency on Jan. 16, 2019 — six months before a national climate emergency was declared by the House of Commons. The motion was presented by councillor Christine Boyle, a vocal proponent of climate justice, after a rally involving high school students was held outside of city hall.
Like Calgary and Edmonton, Vancouver began with a high-level plan that did not face significant opposition at first. This would come later as the plan was implemented.
“Leadership means making hard decisions. If we had acted in line with the climate science 30 or 40 years ago, we could have tackled climate change more gradually. But we didn’t. And now the scale of action required is significant,” writes Boyle in an email.
“As elected leaders we owe it to residents to tell the truth about the scale of the emergency we face, and then we owe it to them to act at the scale of that emergency, in ways that lessens rather than worsens inequality.”
Vancouver Councillor Christine Boyle, the sole elected representative of the OneCity municipal party. Just three months after Boyle was elected to council in 2018, she brought forth a motion to declare a local state of climate emergency, which passed. PHOTO: Courtesy of Christine Boyle
According to an email from Kathryn Harrison, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia (UBC), “some climate emergency declarations are symbolic statements, and others launch a process of emergency actions.”
She puts Vancouver’s move in the latter category.
“The city council not only passed a climate emergency declaration, but when it did, it also asked city staff to report back on what policies are needed to meet the city’s goals. Council then voted in support of a broad range of policies this past fall,” Harrison says.
On Nov. 17, 2020, Vancouver approved its Climate Emergency Action Plan, identifying how the city plans to become carbon neutral before 2050.
Cameron Esler, an organizer and educator with the David Suzuki Foundation, thinks Vancouver did well with their climate action plan, specifically the identification of mobility pricing — a payment system for public road usage — as a key issue.
“I’m pretty impressed,” he says. “I think it’s interesting on the equity and justice lens … they got some feedback about how they need to do better on that, and so they’re adapting it.”
An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report says that “social justice and equity are core aspects of climate-resilient development pathways that aim to limit global warming to 1.5°C as they address challenges and inevitable trade-offs … without making the poor and disadvantaged worse off.”
The three main points in Vancouver’s action plan are: How We Move, How We Build and Renovate, and How We Capture Carbon.
It is under these three points that Vancouver has set target goals for the year 2030, including cutting total carbon emissions in half from 2007 levels and having two-thirds of outings made by active transport and transit.
The action plan also includes a timeline for the identification of how much carbon Vancouver will capture while finding the best methods to reach this target.
The Trail, B.C. office of the West Kootenay EcoSociety. The conservation organization works directly with municipalities in the southern region of the province to introduce renewable energy policies — and says the term 'climate emergency' leads to community division. PHOTO: West Kootenay EcoSociety/Facebook
All or nothing
In southern British Columbia, the West Kootenay EcoSociety is trying to implement a new “model of inclusive and ecologically sustainable living,” eventually leading to a 100 per cent renewable energy transition.
On Feb. 22, 2021, the EcoSociety released its 100% Renewable Energy in Your Community Playbook & Toolkit. It provides “a step by step overview of how to … address the climate crisis in your community in a way that will have some impact, so not in a symbolic way, but in a way that builds momentum and actually does something,” says Montana Burgess, the EcoSociety’s executive director.
The Playbook & Toolkit provides steps for both residents and decision-makers in the construction of a climate action plan. The toolkit portion provides sample documents such as press releases, posters, handouts and agendas for communities to use as they adopt a renewable energy plan.
The EcoSociety has been working on the transition to 100 per cent renewable energy for the past five years. Their energy plan has been adopted by four municipalities in the West Kootenay region, and eight have passed resolutions to make this transition.
In building the renewable energy plan, the EcoSociety worked closely with local governments, attempting to ensure that adopting the plan would be as effortless as possible.
“It was really a two-year process in building the plan, with politics in mind and making sure it was collaborative,” Burgess says.
“It was being worked through the processes they needed internally, to make sure it could come out and then be adopted very quickly.”
Another key point highlighted in the Playbook & Toolkit is how language affects the conversation around climate change. “It is important to use language that resonates with your community. Opening language does not want to shut your message down before you really start,” the report reads.
Some of the phrases that the EcoSociety identified as acceptable are ‘renewable energy,’ ‘clean energy’ and ‘reducing pollution and waste,’ while some problematic phrases that they say can polarize the conversation include ‘climate action/change,’ ‘green new deal’ and ‘climate emergency.’
“People have been declaring climate emergencies … I'm sure it’s shifted the conversation in some ways, but it hasn't changed the game in Canada,” says Burgess.
“[The term ‘emergency’] doesn't really reflect what people intuitively think of as an emergency.”
The way these terms can affect a conversation also factor into how citizens might push back against initiatives like climate emergencies, preventing them from being put into action.
“I think there’s four main value emotional pieces holding people back. One is, they think it's not realistic or possible, a transition to 100 per cent renewable energy … two is, what is the personal cost to me and my family … [three is], we don’t trust a government to be able to bring in solutions to tackle this thing … and the fourth is that change doesn't seem urgent and necessary,” Burgess lists.
A street in Castlegar, B.C., the second-largest municipality in the West Kootenay region of the province. Castlegar was one of the first cities to adopt the West Kootenay EcoSociety's '100% Renewable Energy in Your Community Playbook & Toolkit'. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons
“I don't know where Calgary is at, but I think if … the senior staff of the city are not in touch with what the community cares about, it's going to be really hard to have a plan that reflects community values and has broad public support, which they'll need to pass a plan and resource it,” she says when asked how the EcoSociety’s energy plan might work in Calgary.
For the city to achieve its goals and continue to follow its climate action strategy, Burgess thinks that communication between the public and politicians will be essential.
“If there's a political desire from the politicians, that shows that there's a public desire in the community to do better,” she says.
“You need to build leaders in the community and … you need to actually engage people where they're at and build their leadership to want something, otherwise it's not going to last.”
Climate and Canada’s largest city
The City of Toronto declared a climate emergency on Oct. 2, 2019, using the declaration to announce its own intentions to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
Toronto previously had a climate action strategy in place, titled TransformTo. City council unanimously approved this strategy in July 2017, but the emergency declaration committed the city to accelerate the efforts laid out in the original strategy. The most significant change was the adoption of the stronger emissions reduction target.
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada based in Toronto, says that having Canada’s most populous city declare a climate emergency has the potential to affect other cities’ decisions.
“It’s the largest city in the country … it’s a good place to put an issue on the agenda that can be picked up in other places as well,” says Stewart.
In addition to climate emergency declarations sending a message, Stewart believes they are also a commitment to understanding the urgency and prioritizing the actions a city identifies to combat climate change.
Despite some hesitation on Stewart’s part as to whether or not Toronto would go through with the declaration, council again voted unanimously to take the step. He thinks a youth march held six days prior may have been a turning point.
“I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know if this will pass, because [Toronto Mayor John Tory] will probably oppose it.' But, I think the moment you had 10,000 kids march past city hall, the mayor was like, ‘okay, we’re declaring a climate emergency.’”
Toronto is one of the dozens of Ontario municipalities that have declared a local climate emergency since 2019. Like many other cities, Toronto has set a goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, in line with the recommendations of the Paris Agreement. PHOTO: Sam Javanrouh/Flickr
Stewart has seen Toronto’s response to climate change improve over the years. After moving to the city in 1992, he “never got around to leaving,” and has been involved in the city’s environmental scene ever since.
“Toronto has actually had a climate plan for a very long time … in the early 2000s, they had a climate plan, [but it] wasn’t a great one, and it’s gotten better over time, every year,” he says.
“Particularly, what we've seen is an integration in Toronto of the traditional, kind of green climate actions with a broader climate justice and equity perspective.”
Stewart believes there are some lessons Calgary can take from the way Toronto has dealt with climate change initiatives.
“There is a portion of the population everywhere — polling tells us it’s a little bit bigger in Alberta — who … are like, ‘okay, I don’t actually think [climate change] is an emergency. But, the broad majority of Canadians and Albertans do, and so ... how do you tap into that?” he asks.
The answer rests with that majority, Stewart says, adding that by engaging with politicians and making their voices heard, the public may be able to sway city councillors to change their minds on the issue if they are passionate enough.
“Municipalities actually can play a key role in … getting stuff moving and rolling and just getting stuff done, because that's what municipalities do. They get stuff done,” he says.
“It's really hard to move politicians. But once voters have indicated they care, politicians, suddenly, can have a change of heart. Or at least, leave to go to the bathroom during the vote.”
What can Calgary learn from other cities?
Esler thinks a city like Calgary doesn’t necessarily have to take the steps to declare a climate emergency, as cities like Vancouver have done.
“A climate action emergency declaration is really important, but not absolutely always necessary, depending on where you are and what you’re trying to achieve.”
He compares Calgary to Saskatoon, which hasn’t made an emergency declaration or released any plans to do so, but has worked to combat climate change nonetheless by, for example, offering interest-free loans to residents who wish to make energy-efficient upgrades to their homes, payable through property taxes.
“Any municipality can be taking action now … initiatives like that can be done with or without a declaration,” says Esler.
Speaking of Saskatchewan, another example of a city putting actions in place without explicitly declaring a climate emergency is Regina, where a goal has been put in place to make the city net-zero for carbon emissions by 2050.
“I know many other municipalities are doing really good work when it comes to climate action,” says Borrowman.
“If they don’t see the need … to make a declaration, at the end of the day, as long as they’re taking on the necessary work and reducing GHGs as best they can in municipalities, that’s all we should be asking of any other government.”
“It really depends on what’s behind it, right? I think declaring a climate emergency is a really good way to allow your constituents to hold you accountable … but I don’t think that Calgary should do it just to do it,” says MacDonald.
“You better mean it. That’s a big statement, and it’s true … but if you’re not going to then pass policy to back that up, then what’s the point?”
According to Kai Chan, Harrison’s colleague at UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, there is a large divide in opinions that separates Calgary from Vancouver in terms of declaring a climate emergency, despite the close proximity of the two western Canadian cities.
“I think that the political situation is just so different … I don’t know how much Calgary can really learn from how Vancouver did that,” Chan says.
“Vancouver is a city of greenies for the most part, right? There’s certainly folks who don’t see eye-to-eye with that perspective, but it is the prevailing one … and Calgary is in a different kind of position.”
Chan feels like the issue holds more weight with citizens of Vancouver than it does for Calgary’s population.
A demonstration for climate action in Vancouver. The city was the first municipality in Canada to declare a climate emergency, and councillor Christine Boyle describes it as "one of the most ambitious and comprehensive climate action plans in North America." PHOTO: Chris Yakimov/Flickr
“The climate emergency is an appropriate reflection of how most people are feeling about that issue … that’s not the feeling in Calgary yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is within a couple of years — things are changing so quickly,” he says.
“I think that the folks that are really strongly in opposition, and that are steering the conversation are the industry leaders … that conversation has got to be one that is, kind of a major political battleground in this nation [and] more broadly, in North America,” says Chan.
Change in sight
Chan sees Calgary’s place within the oil and gas industry as a factor that may limit the city’s ability to take the leap and declare a climate emergency.
“That resistance is not so much about what the emergency would actually entail legally, but rather that it would signal a potential need to take actions that might undermine the prevailing oil and gas industries in Alberta,” he says.
Chan adds that there are already signs of change coming down the pipe that may represent a threat to this industry — one of which being General Motors declaring that every car they manufacture will be electric by 2035.
He also believes that if the economic or social landscape dictates moving in the direction of declaring a climate emergency, the act of declaring one “doesn't add any new threat to the oil and gas industry that doesn’t already exist.”
Esler thinks it may be easier for politicians in Calgary to focus on coming up with specific strategies to combat climate change instead of pushing for an emergency declaration.
“A solutions approach would probably go over well in Calgary … the solution is going to differentiate from city to city,” he says.
“I think that’s a decision you as Calgarians need to make.”