A backlash to bans on gas infrastructure in new buildings has arrived in Canada.

Last week, Vancouver City Council voted to repeal its prohibition of “natural” gas for heating new buildings in a move climate advocates say will jeopardize the city’s climate goals.

“Council’s decision is [a] big step back for a city renowned for its leadership,” said Betsy Agar, the director of the Pembina Institute’s buildings program. “To stick natural gas back into new home construction would jeopardize Vancouver’s climate goals and do nothing to reduce the costs of operating buildings over the long term.”

The repeal comes as state and municipal gas bans are going through a bit of an evolution in the United States, as they have continued to spread but have also suffered some setbacks in court. More than two dozen Republican-led state governments have barred municipalities from introducing their own prohibitions. And the first city in North America to introduce a ban – Berkeley, California – was forced to repeal its ban after a 2023 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling rolled it back.

Vancouver’s move came after a change in government. City council originally implemented the ban (which did not extend to gas used for cooking) in 2020. But last week, a group of conservative councillors, who were part of Mayor Ken Sim’s centre-right ABC Vancouver party elected in 2022, tried to turn the issue into an affordability one. The contingent claimed that reversing the prohibition was necessary to keep the cost of new homes down. Sim, who was called into the council meeting on Zoom while he was on vacation to cast a tie-breaking vote, said that “we all love the environment, but we need balance. We also have an affordability crisis.”

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Climate advocates have, however, questioned whether the move will improve affordability, given that electrified buildings can be built cost-effectively.

“The housing crisis in Vancouver is driven by multiple complex factors, and delaying the construction of reliable, climate-safe buildings that are affordable to heat and cool is not a viable solution,” Agar said. “Local governments should collaborate with the provincial government to ensure new homes meet the highest standards for efficiency and electrification. This approach not only reduces emissions but also lowers energy costs for residents.”

Vancouver’s buildings are responsible for approximately 55% of the city’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Considering that, advocates say the repeal of the ban will greatly hinder the city’s pledge to reduce its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. City staff have warned council that rolling back the bylaw could set the city back “tens of thousands” of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

The new policy will likely come into effect in November and comes at a time when other cities in B.C., such as Victoria, have adopted the top tier of a stringent provincial building code that will limit the greenhouse gas emissions of new buildings and effectively phase out most fossil-fuel use in them.

“By reverting to natural gas, [Vancouver] risks locking itself into a high-carbon infrastructure at a time when urgent climate action is needed,” Agar said.

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For all that, Montreal struggles to meet its ambitious carbon reduction targets, says Blaise Rémillard, manager of planning and mobility at Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal (CRE Montréal), an environmental watchdog group. “We have a lot of good plans and a lot of good targets,” he says. But Montreal’s carbon has climbed since the pandemic, and the prospect for hitting the 2030 mark – 55% below 1990 levels – seems poor. “We don’t really know how we can do a reduction of about one-third of emissions within the next five years.”

The City of Toronto also has an expansive net-zero plan, dubbed TransformTO, as well as one of North America’s few municipal policies (the Toronto Green Standard) designed to push builders to drive energy efficiency beyond the low bar in the Ontario Building Code. But it suffers from the same dilemma. TransformTO, says Sarah Buchanan, campaigns director at the Toronto Environmental Alliance, “still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.” Case in point: city council finally approved, but has not yet allocated funding for, a waterfront LRT meant to provide transit access to existing and planned high-density developments on Toronto’s de-industrialized port lands.

A few other cities have fared better when it comes to putting their money where their mouths are. Halifax Regional Municipality last year imposed a climate change tax as a pillar of its broader sustainability strategy, dubbed HalifACT. “At the time, it was the only one of its kind across Canada, and that had some really contentious public support,” says Kortney Dunsby, sustainable cities co-ordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax. The funding has gone toward investments such as building retrofits.

However, recent population growth and housing price spikes in the Halifax region appear to be driving sprawl as developers snap up cheap land along the region’s edges, with little resistance from the municipality and little in the way of transit investment to service those emerging communities. “Greenfield development [i.e., building projects on completely undeveloped land, such as farmers’ fields] is becoming a conversation, which is sometimes at odds with our climate plan,” observes Ahsan Habib, a professor at Dalhousie University and director of the Dalhousie Transportation Collaboratory.

The problem with city climate plans

As Canada has become more urbanized, greenhouse gas emissions from Canadian urban communities have declined by 17% from 1990 levels. Meanwhile, emissions from the rural economy – heavy industry, mining, oil and gas, agriculture and intercity transport – have increased by 30% over the same period. Since 2005, moreover, urban emissions have fallen by more than a quarter, while rural emissions from those same sectors have remained stable. Both statistics show that cities are driving Canada’s progress toward its 2030 targets.

Still, there’s a chasm between what municipal climate plans call for and what they actually deliver, and that fact of urban life is not new. Sustainability consultant Jeb Brugmann, the founder of Resilient Cities Catalyst, describes it as “the implementation gap,” adding that this type of shortcoming stems from the fact that municipal climate strategies originally took hold among planners. “Part of the planning conceit,” he says, “is that if you do planning, somehow it triggers implementation.” In his experience, climate plans falter because city officials don’t follow through by then doing the hard work of hacking through the Gordian knot of regulatory and cultural obstacles to change.

Others point out that these strategies may do little more than reinforce actions cities were already taking. A decade ago, then–McGill University geographer Adam Millard-Ball did a deep dive into the climate plans and policies for 600 U.S. cities and concluded that in most cases, they simply reflected the prevailing political preferences of individual cities, and spelled out actions that would have likely happened with or without an overarching strategy. 

“Cities with climate plans have had far greater success in implementing strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than their counterparts without such plans,” he wrote in the Journal of Urban Economics. “They have more green buildings, spend more on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and have implemented more programs to divert waste from methane-generating landfills. I find little evidence, however, that climate plans play any causal role in this success.” 

Part of the explanation for the buyer’s regret with climate plans can be found in the tangle of overlapping jurisdictions that touch the climate file and make it exceedingly difficult for cities to drive ahead with solutions. In Montreal, mobility-related emissions have remained stubbornly high because the province continues to pour money into highways. While EV adoption is impressive thanks to subsidies and the deployment of charging infrastructure (see p. 38), EV owners will drive instead of taking transit, which remains a far more climate-friendly solution. 

As for energy, Montrealers rely in part on cheap natural gas because Hydro-Québec has long exported the province’s surplus hydro power and relied instead on “peaker plants.” (Even though 94% of the province’s electricity capacity is hydroelectric, fossil fuels account for more than half of all the energy consumed in Quebec.) Rémillard describes Quebeckers’ view of natural gas as “complacent.” In Toronto, the city incentivizes builders to disconnect from natural gas, but the provincial government has continued to expand Enbridge’s gas distribution network. 

[TransformTO] still doesn’t have the energy, funding and oomph behind it to make it do what council committed to.

 

– Sarah Buchanan, Toronto Environmental Alliance

What’s more, the story of hobbled city-driven climate mitigation or adaption plans is also a function of regulatory inertia. In most jurisdictions, for example, building codes – that is, minimum standards for fire and structural safety, energy efficiency, et cetera – are set at the provincial or state level, which means municipalities are limited in how effectively they can push developers, using their own permitting systems, to reduce building-related carbon.

Of course, emissions don’t care about administrative borders. Yet administrative borders determine municipal climate action plans, such as transit investment. The result is that suburban areas, which tend to be car-dependent because of sprawl-oriented planning policies made decades ago, may care much less about spending on transit, not necessarily because their mayors and councils are climate dinosaurs, but because transit infrastructure in low-density areas is incredibly expensive.

The analysis becomes even trickier depending on what type of urban carbon we’re choosing to measure. According to a 2020 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Sustainability, city climate strategies typically focus on the production of carbon, via tailpipe emissions, energy generation and so on. But if you widen the focus to include consumption-related carbon – for instance, carbon generated by the manufacture and distribution of consumer goods purchased in the city, everything from food to consumer electronics, and including the supply chains that lead to urban markets – the total is considerably higher. Paradoxically, cities with ambitious climate plans may also be wealthier, which means more consumption and thus more carbon.

All of these cross-currents butt up against one of the more dominant strains of climate politics, which is that global cities and their mayors have established themselves at the vanguard of carbon reduction, often in response to the lack of effective policy from national governments. Organizations like the C40, an international network of sustainability-minded cities, work hard to promote ambitious strategies, pilot projects and technologies that have moved the needle in various metropolitan areas. 

Tough questions hover around the achievability of these urban sustainability goals that depend primarily on government investments but lack proper enforcement mechanisms and penalties. Some cities are beginning to think in those terms. At the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Buchanan points out that the City of Toronto is looking at a proposal to compel the owners of larger commercial structures to disclose their carbon consumption – a figure that, theoretically, might cause tenants to think twice about energy-inefficient buildings and the unnecessarily high energy costs they may incur in their lease arrangements. Eventually, she adds, landlords may face fines or fees for failing to upgrade their buildings, but city council hasn’t signed off yet on such a move.

There’s evidence from elsewhere that tougher policies do work. In New York City, for example, Local Law 97, which was enacted in 2019 and comes into effect this year, sets emissions caps on buildings of a certain size, with non-compliant landlords facing hefty fines. The regulation applies to 50,000 properties that exceed 25,000 square feet in total area. City officials say the vast majority of landlords have already moved to comply with the 2024 target reduction, but they’ll have to push even further to satisfy the 2030 benchmark (40% reductions).

The other conundrum is whether overly broad city climate plans become bureaucratically unmanageable because of their breadth of ambition – the “too much body/not enough blanket” problem. Asked to identify the most impactful municipal climate policy, the Ecology Action Centre’s Dunsby replies, “In planning, we call these wicked planning problems.” Halifax’s housing crisis isn’t unique to this city, she adds, “but I do think that focusing housing development in already serviced areas and focusing on trying to build out truly complete communities – mixed-use, walkable, transit-oriented development – would truly help to reduce our community-scale emissions.”

A large body of evidence confirms that land-use planning and development that drives density is, in fact, among the most effective ways to cut urban emissions. In a paper published this spring in the journal Cities, an American-Mexican team of geographers scrutinized land-use regulation in 431 urban areas in 40 countries. “Our findings confirm that dense, compact urban areas, with built-up downtowns and shorter roadway segments, have lower per capita carbon emissions,” they concluded, adding that restrictions on intensification, such as the protection of low-rise neighbourhoods, fuels sprawl and all the carbon that sprawl brings.

But both Buchanan and Dunsby caution against the notion that there’s a silver bullet when it comes to decarbonizing cities. “The investment in accelerating housing development and density has to come at the same time as investing in really high-functioning, efficient and reliable transit systems,” Dunsby says.

[Burnaby’s Metrotown is] a very unique hub. That ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.

 

– Jeb Brugmann, founder, Resilient Cities Catalyst

Indeed, Ahsan Habib and many other climate-conscious planners argue that cities need to make decisions on how they grow and develop in lockstep with investments in green transportation infrastructure. “Whenever we are growing certain parts of the city, do we have a plan in place to move those people [and] achieve certain target modal splits [i.e., the proportion of people who travel by transit, bike or foot as opposed to cars]? If we do that, there is no chicken-and-egg problem.”

Brugmann points out that in some cities, strong political leaders have broken down silos that too often stand in the way of urban climate action. He cites the case of Curitiba, Brazil, where a long-serving mayor with no patience for official plans used his power to build an extensive bus rapid-transit network, a formula now in use in many large Latin American cities. 

He also cites examples closer to home, such as Metro Vancouver, where far-sighted planning and investment led, over three decades, to high-density development in the West End and impressive intensification around the expanding SkyTrain network. Brugmann lived for several months in Metrotown – a dense, transit-oriented community in Burnaby that’s grown up over the past two decades or so and seems to be delivering on the vision of a compact, pedestrian-friendly community connected to the region by transit. “It’s a very unique hub,” he says. “I’m telling you, that ain’t no 15-minute city. That’s a five-minute city.”

For our spring issue, Corporate Knights looks at a handful of urban indicators – greenhouse gases per capita, tree canopy and EV charging infrastructure – in eight large cities across Canada. Check back here for more city  features from our Spring 2024 issue. 

John Lorinc is a Toronto-based journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture. 

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As water levels continued to climb along the Ottawa River in late April, the nation’s capital became one of the latest Canadian towns to declare a climate emergency. It’s not a moment too soon. After 30 years of work by the largest scientific collaboration in human history, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the climate crisis that humanity faces is now beyond question. A generation after they were first predicted, the impacts are now increasingly visible in Canada and around the world. Fires, floods, droughts, storms, wind and extreme heat are becoming increasingly severe.

In Ontario alone, insured losses from extreme weather events exceeded $1.3 billion in 2018. Uninsured financial losses by individuals, companies and institutions are often estimated to be one to three times as large as reported insured losses. On top of that, the Insurance Bureau of Canada reports that governments incur about $3 in damage to infrastructure and other public services for every $1 of those insured losses. And all these figures only cover losses measured directly in money, omitting significant health and environmental damage.

In the face of this crisis, as well as the collapse of biodiversity, it is beyond tragic that so many “senior” levels of government are doing so little – or worse, in some cases undoing a decade or more of hard work. With a federal election looming, the future of federal climate action is also uncertain.

In these dispiriting circumstances, municipal leadership is of great importance. As the owners and operators of most of Canada’s infrastructure, municipalities are at the front line of much climate damage. In many ways, they have more to lose from climate inaction than other levels of government. For one, they bear increasing social welfare needs as climate change disproportionately affects the poorest and most vulnerable. Municipalities are also much more vulnerable to liability lawsuits than senior levels of government, and municipal representatives are more visible and accountable to their constituents.

Fortunately, municipalities can also do something about it, which is why it’s exciting to see so many Canadian municipalities joining the ranks of over 520 councils around the world in declaring climate emergencies.

Most of these are in Quebec, where over 300 municipalities have signed “declarations d’urgence climatique.” Others in Canada include Halifax, Vancouver, Kingston, Hamilton, Richmond, London, Burnaby, Nanaimo, Burlington, St. Catharines, Moncton, and Old Crow!

A declaration will not, of course, accomplish anything unless it’s followed by real action. Only significant changes to business as usual can meaningfully affect the trajectory we’re on.

Aside from the enormous cost of adapting to the wilder, weirder weather that’s coming, adaptation will likely become impossible if we don’t reduce emissions. And climate pollution mitigation is where we face the biggest policy and implement gap.

Where can municipalities cut emissions?  

The majority of urban GHG emissions come from three sources:

• energy use in buildings (a function of both energy sources and energy demand)
• transportation
• waste management

Municipalities can tackle the climate pollution they themselves emit through heating and cooling municipal buildings, water treatment and use, vehicle fleets, waste management, etc. But they can have the largest climate impact by influencing the emissions of others – namely, all of us who live and work in and visit their municipalities.

It’s not just about land use bylaws and taxes, essential though they may be. Municipalities can galvanize private and public action through their targets and the examples that they set. Their relationships with others can build coalitions, generate buy-in and facilitate implementation of new ideas, new financial tools, and new standards of practice.

Vancouver is trying to lead the way. In January, it  adopted its climate emergency declaration, giving staff 90 days to come back with a plan of action. On April 29, Vancouver city council approved a Climate Emergency report with six new pollution reduction targets (called “big moves”) and 53 “accelerated actions”.

The “six big moves” are:

1. Walkable communities: By 2030, 90% of people live within an easy walk and roll of their daily needs.

2. Safe and convenient active transportation and transit: By 2030, two-thirds of trips in Vancouver will be by active transportation and transit.

3. Pollution-free cars, trucks and buses: By 2030, 50% of the kilometres driven on Vancouver’s roads will be by zero emissions vehicles.

4. Zero-emission space and water heating: By 2025, all new and replacement heating and hot water systems will be zero emissions.

5. Lower carbon construction: By 2030, the embodied emissions from new buildings and construction projects will be reduced by 40% compared to a 2018 baseline.

6. Restored forests and coast: By fall 2020, Vancouver will develop “negative emission” targets that can be achieved by restoring forest and coastal ecosystems.

The true significance of these targets won’t be visible until they start changing council decisions, especially on budgets, on infrastructure and on development. Council has promised to put a “climate lens” on its 2020 budget. In the meantime, Vancouver has pledged an impressive list of “accelerated actions” such as:

• considering zero emission areas (essentially car-free zones), road pricing and new parking rules
• density bonuses for zero emission buildings
• a climate trust/green bank to finance upgrades
• adding e-bikes to the bike sharing program
• a comprehensive waste reduction and diversion program for all city facilities
• a procurement policy that prioritizes local food in city-run facilities
• greening community events that the city runs, sponsors, and permits and
• reducing greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel use in city-run buildings and vehicles.

It’s inspiring to see this kind of municipal leadership at a time when good environmental news is in such short supply. Hopefully, Canadian cities won’t be alone in calling climate change what it is – an emergency – and then acting accordingly. Monday, the Ontario legislature will be debating an NDP motion to declare a climate emergency in this province. Any meaningful hope now has to come from a willingness to try new ways of doing things, and as The Democracy Center’s Jim Schulz said,  “from knowing that what is truly possible never reveals itself until we take the risk to seek it.”

Dianne Saxe is president of Saxe Facts, a business providing strategic advice and presentations on climate, energy and environment. She is the former Environmental Commissioner of Ontario and is a certified environmental law specialist.

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