Ottawa struggles to help residents meet emission targets with 15 per cent budget for measures

Of the $260.2 million Environment and Climate Change Committee budget at the City of Ottawa, $33.9 million of capital investments will contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, while $14.9 million of capital investments will support adaptation measures such as building resiliency. 

Overall the $260 million makes up 15.5 per cent of the city’s total $1.68 billion capital budget. Ottawa has long been praised for being a sustainable city with over 800 km of bike paths and trails and the surrounding Greenbelt.

But when it comes to certain city operations, Ottawa is falling behind other Canadian cities for environmental initiatives.

“This plan focuses heavily on mitigating emissions from city infrastructure, leaving deficits for community-based action and adaptation,” Jenna Phillips, a volunteer with Ecology Ottawa’s Council Watch, wrote in a press release. “As this Council’s first term concludes, its unwillingness to acknowledge and act on the intricate links between climate change and municipal priorities like affordable housing, mobility, resilience and a strong economy grows evident.”

As of August 2024, the city had reached a mere 22 per cent of it’s annual housing target, leaving it out of reach of receiving provincial funding through the Building Faster Fund. In the meantime, the city has delayed the implementation of High Performance Development Standards (HPDS) that would enforce building projects to achieve sustainable and resilient design.

First approved in April 2022, council voted to delay implementation awaiting changes to provincial legislation that could impact its outcome. But there are a variety of other cities across Ontario that have pushed full steam ahead with sustainable building standards, despite uncertainty on the provincial level.

At the beginning of 2024, the City of Mississauga implemented a strengthened set of Green Development Standards (GDS) that largely took inspiration from the City of Toronto’s tiered approach.

A hesitancy to renew these standards leaves home efficiency in the hands of the owner. While residents can receive rebates for things like heat pumps, implementing development standards shifts the burden of climate responsibility from individual homeowners to developers and the municipality.

Phillips said the city needs to focus on intersectional solutions, ones that reduce multiple societal inequities. One high-cost sector that can improve some inequalities is transportation.

Promoting transportation not only has benefits for the climate, but it provides a low-cost transportation choice for lower-income individuals.

But the OC Transpo budget sparked outrage from the community when it was presented. To afford other initiatives such as zero emissions busses and increased service, council passed an eight per cent increase to the transit levy and implemented fare increases.

“We should be encouraging young people to adopt transit as a way of life, not pushing them toward car dependence,”  Derrick Simpson, transportation chair at the Centretown Community Association (CCA) wrote in a letter to the mayor and councillors prior to the approval of the budget.

While initiatives like zero-emissions buses are costly, the city has so far fallen behind on this implementation, making it unclear whether the fare increase will have any real impact.

With just four zero emissions pilot busses on the roads, which the city has noted are performing well, the delivery of new buses continues to be delayed.

Highlights of the Environment and Climate Change Committee budget include:  

• $14.4 million for tree and forest maintenance;
• $1.9 million for tree planting programs;
• $2.8 million in energy-management investments; and 
• $2 million for natural-area acquisitions, including funds to secure and conserve important greenspaces and environmental lands. 

At the request of council, the 2025 budget includes an additional $1 million for the Climate Change Master Plan (CCMP), bringing total funding for 2025 to $6 million.

The CCMP was implemented in January 2020, after the city declared a climate emergency. But while the city is moving forward on its corporate emissions reductions, it is slow to reduce emissions from the community.

Across the city, corporate emissions have decreased 43 per cent between 2012 and 2020, ahead of its short-term target of reducing emissions by 30 per cent by 2025. Between 2012 and 2018, community emissions decreased 14 per cent, surpassing the target of reducing 12 per cent by 2024. But the city’s Auditor General has said Ottawa is not expected to reach its 2025 target for community emissions.

Reaching those targets are crucial, not only to prevent further warming, but also to ward off the high costs of natural disasters. An annual report from the Insurance Bureau of Canada found 2023 to be the fourth costliest year on record for climate-related disasters, with over $3.1 billion in insured damages.

The longer municipalities wait to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the more funds they will have to put forth to increase building, infrastructure and service resiliency.