As municipal officials from across Canada flocked to Edmonton for the Canadian Federation of Municipalities conference, a group of them gathered off-site Thursday in an effort to bring the climate crisis back to the centre of national discussion.
It was the first-ever climate summit organized by Elbows Up for Climate, an initiative launched by former Montreal mayor Valerie Plante and former Toronto mayor David Miller with an open letter to federal party leaders during last year’s election.
“We convened today’s climate summit ahead of another wildfire season, because the situation facing the places we love is urgent,” said Plante at a news conference at the Art Gallery of Alberta. “We cannot keep doubling down on fossil fuel production while our communities flood and burn. We need federal leadership on climate, not backsliding.”
Elbows Up for Climate has five policy aims: a national clean energy grid in every direction, the building of at least 2 million net-zero below-market homes, mass retrofits, heat pumps and solar installations, a national high-speed rail system connected to local electric buses and a ”national resilience, response and recovery strategy.”
The national strategy would be funded by a windfall tax on oil and gas companies’ excess profits from the price spikes due to the US-Israel war on Iran. Such a tax is supported by two-thirds of Canadians, according to a poll Elbows Up commissioned from Liaison Stratégies.
The group also launched an interactive climate impacts map the day of the gathering.
“We need nation building, not nation burning projects,” said Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland at the news conference, offering Jasper National Park as a “model for the nation, inevitably when we talk about big national projects.”
Miller told Canada’s National Observer that broadly speaking, he supports Prime Minister Mark Carney’s efforts to reduce Canadian dependence on the United States, because “they’ve shown they’re not a reliable partner,” but that Carney’s missing a major opportunity to do so on the climate front.
“We could be one of the world’s leaders in clean energy. And unfortunately it’s, charitably, a massive blind spot; uncharitably, [climate has] been deliberately taken off the table,” said the former Toronto mayor who held the post from 2003 to 2010.
The event featured closed-door discussions on how municipal governments can take climate action in the face of federal and provincial inaction, followed by a keynote lecture from journalist John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, which details the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire.
Vaillant told Canada’s National Observer that Carney has taken an especially aggressive pivot away from climate concerns since he became prime minister last year, matching the approach of Conservative Premiers Doug Ford in Ontario and Danielle Smith in Alberta, which he characterized as “neoliberalism with the gloves off.”
Vaillant likened the gutting of environmental regulations to facilitate private sector investment as a return to the 19th century “colonial imperialism” of the Hudson’s Bay Company. “If you put a wig on Carney and put a wig on Ford, you can’t unsee it,” he said.
According to the Canadian Climate Institute president Rick Smith, Carney’s agreement with Smith to build a new bitumen pipeline and weaken the federal industrial carbon tax puts Canada’s stated commitment to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 “firmly out of reach.”
But Vaillant said he had “a lot of faith in mayors” to step up and fill the void on climate action.
“At the mayoral level, you’re dealing with a small enough and a specific enough group of people as a constituency that you can really affect powerful, relevant local change that really has meaning for those people,” he said.
Mayors offer local solutions, recount climate impact
Plante, who served as Montreal mayor from 2017 until last year, touted her city’s mandatory carbon neutrality for new buildings as one of her signature climate policies, which she achieved in collaboration with the private sector.
She acknowledged, however, that addressing Montreal’s largest emissions source — transportation — is dependent on the federal Canada Public Transit Fund, which Carney cut by $5 billion, or 17 per cent, this year.
Plante added that municipal leaders have an obligation not only to implement local climate policy, but to articulate the climate crisis’ “direct impact on citizens” and break the “cycle of silence where we believe that nobody cares anymore.”
For Vaillant, the Fort McMurray fire could have been a catalyst for urgent climate action, but instead political leaders have moved in the opposite direction over the past decade as climate disasters have grown increasingly worse.
“Now every single person in the country knows somebody who’s been put on evacuation alert, or been evacuated, if they haven’t been evacuated themselves, and those are traumatic events,” he said.
“Many of them went back and there was no home there, and that messes with your head. You will never be the same again after that.”
Few people know that better than Jasper’s mayor.
At the news conference prior to Vaillant’s keynote, Ireland shared two items that were recovered from the “ash and debris” that used to be his home before the 2024 Jasper wildfire: his son’s Governor General’s Award and a belt buckle gifted to Ireland by the superintendent of Jasper National Park for its 100th anniversary.
“Before this experience, I might have remained silent, as so many do, about the difficult issues we struggle to balance in Canada — climate action in particular, and the production of more fossil fuels,” said Ireland.
“Now I feel a duty and obligation to speak out and to do what I can to prevent the trauma of what we in Jasper went through from happening to another community anywhere in this country.”
Climate concerns taking backseat to affordability
Edmonton Mayor Andrew Knack told CNO that climate considerations have been put on the back burner due to an emphasis on affordability and public safety concerns, but that these issues are closely interconnected.
Edmonton city council adopted a $1.6 billion flood mitigation plan in 2019, said Knack, “because what used to be a one-in-100-year flood, when many of these neighborhoods were built, is now a far more common occurrence.”
“I would have much rather used that money on libraries, recreation centres, parks, fire halls and and things that help genuinely improve people’s quality of life, but we absolutely had to do that because inaction on flood mitigation would have a detrimental impact on people’s quality of life,” he said.
He cited net-zero transportation and housing as ways of directly addressing climate and affordability concerns together.
Yellowknife Mayor Ben Hendriksen described his initial intention “to focus on active transportation, vacant buildings and land and transparency at city hall” when he was elected in 2022.
“I never expected to be planning for and responding to climate emergencies that need us to protect our city,” Hendriksen said, referring to Yellowknife’s August 2023 wildfire evacuation.
He added that the North is uniquely vulnerable to the climate crisis.
“As we warm two-to-four times faster than the rate of the rest of the world, we also face higher energy costs than the rest of the country because of our aging power generation, both hydro and diesel, and rising insurance premiums, pricing and climate emergencies,” said Hendriksen.
Mixed messages on military spending
While Carney has slashed spending on climate-friendly initiatives, he’s engaged in a massive military buildup outlined in Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy.
By the Canadian government’s own admission, the Department of National Defence is the “largest user of energy and the single largest emitter of GHG in the federal government.”
Since becoming mayor, Knack has become an advocate for the Edmonton Region Defence Alliance, which is seeking to woo military contractors to invest in Alberta’s capital city. Knack told CNO that he believes Canada’s military expansion could pose an opportunity to attract investment for certain climate-friendly initiatives.
He said he envisions leveraging military investments to refurbish the aging CFB Edmonton, located just north of the city limits in Sturgeon County, build housing and provide health care for the influx of Canadian Forces members who could be coming to Edmonton.
“I’m not looking to be the bombs or guns headquarters here,” said Knack.
Hendriksen said there are “incredible opportunities” presented by defence investments in the North, citing an expansion to the Taltson hydro plant in Fort Smith that will double the Northwest Territories’ hydro capacity, which has been prioritized by the federal Major Projects Office.
Due to drought conditions over the past five years, Yellowknife has gone from relying almost entirely on clean hydro-electricity to generating nearly half of its power from emissions-intensive diesel fuel.
“Our infrastructure is aging, it’s decades and decades and decades old. It’s not keeping up with the power generation that we currently have … so any investments in the North from a security and sovereignty space I think have a real opportunity to improve us overall,” said Hendriksen.
Elbows Up for Climate has sent a joint statement signed by the dozens of municipal officials who participated in Thursday’s summit to Carney, with whom leaders are hoping to arrange a meeting to discuss their priorities.