Activists push for stronger city commitment to green energy

By Greg Guevara

Environmental activists across Ottawa say they’re worried the upcoming municipal budget will not address the city’s promise of a renewable energy strategy.

Gillian Walker, a Centretown resident who works with a group of environmental advocates supported by Ecology Ottawa, said she’s concerned that the 2018 budget will not invest enough in renewable energy.

Walker and the other eco-advocates call themselves the “renewable city team.”

“The strategy is just a literature review and a plan to make a plan,” said Walker, who said the city is running out of time to become a leader in the transition away from fossil fuels.

“The city committed to implementing a clean energy strategy this term,” she added. “And the term is almost over.”

Ecology Ottawa recently released a renewable energy report urging the City of Ottawa to ground their strategy in what the report calls “three fundamental building blocks”—at least $1.5 million invested in renewable energy plans; an approach to create jobs within the renewable energy industry; and specific policy changes for transportation and construction, which combined are responsible for almost 90 per cent of Ottawa’s emissions.

The activists said that if the update on the renewable energy contains no tangible steps toward reducing Ottawa’s greenhouse gas emissions, then the next chance to do so will be in the 2019 budget — five years after the initial promise was made in 2014.

Ecology Ottawa’s renewable energy report credits Capital Coun. David Chernushenko as being a “major environmental champion” and who, after being appointed to lead the city’s environment committee, has worked to facilitate conversation about the city’s renewable energy plan.

He said he’s heard the criticism that the upcoming budget is going to lack “meat on the bones,” as he put it. But he said this year’s renewable energy plan is not just going to just be more talk about future action: “No,” he said in an interview, “it’s considerably more than that.”

Chernushenko said there will be some insightful analysis in the plan, as well. “We want action to be based on strong understanding,” he said, “but it can’t be only that.”

The renewable energy plan will be broken into phases, the first of which will be released at the end of this year. “Not only is this a one-year or a four-year plan,” said Chernushenko in explaining the phases, the first of which will focus on renewable energy generation, “this is a for-the-rest-of-the-life-of-the-city plan.”

Chernushenko explained that the chief reason for the delay in fulfilling the city’s promise to make progress on renewable energy was due to a lengthy internal reorganization that pushed back the plan a year. That, he said, was compounded by the fact that an ambitious plan is “just going to take a long time to do well.”

Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury has been in charge of several public meetings about the city’s budget.

Fleury, who said he left the city’s environment committee in 2014 after feeling like the group was “going nowhere” with Ottawa’s environmental needs, also referenced the reorganization as a drag on progress. “With all the changes in the city, it feels like it has really fallen backwards,” he said.

Fleury said anything “city-wide that’s meaningful, we struggle with.” He agreed with Ecology Ottawa’s request for $1.5 million in clean energy investments, and said it’s a small amount that could go a long way.

“It’s no longer hypothetical,” Fleury said on climate change. “It’s time we stopped being reactive and start being proactive.”

The budget is scheduled to be approved by Dec. 13.