A quarter-century of progress on local climate and sustainability initiatives is at risk as Canada approaches a high-stakes federal election, Housing and Infrastructure Minister Nathaniel Erskine-Smith said Wednesday.
“Elections matter,” Erskine-Smith said, during a brief appearance at the Sustainable Communities Conference in Fredericton, hosted by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM). “We saw one election south of the border, and we go from being a longstanding friend, the greatest relationship in the history of the world between two countries, and it’s now chaos and combative.”
In Canada, he added, “I don’t want to be too partisan, but we’re putting all of this work in to get the communities we deserve.” And “one election. That’s all it takes, and it disappears.”
Since 2000, much of that work has been financed through the Green Municipal Fund (GMF), established by FCM with an endowment from the federal government. GMF says interest on that endowment has enabled it to invest C$1.6 billion in 2,336 approved projects that avoided 2.9 million tonnes of climate pollution while saving 990,000 gigajoules of energy and treating 282 million cubic metres of water per year.
The fund received its most recent cash infusion in June 2024, in the form of a $530-million investment from the federal Climate Adaptation Action Plan.
But “we need the density, we need transit connected to housing” to deliver on bigger-picture goals like affordability, clean air, and safety, Erskine-Smith told The Energy Mix. After 25 years of serving those goals through the GMF, “all the programs they’ve put in place to collaborate with municipalities and drive sustainability…all of that is at risk.”
FCM Director of Marketing and Communications Julie Smithers said the organization “can’t comment on speculation,” but “has had strong relationships with all political parties for its 125-year history and we continue to to this day.”
For the GMF, “the reality is that we have a strong, secure endowment that funds the majority of the programs we operate,” she told The Mix. “A lot of that funding is already contracted, those agreements are in place. So we’re confident the fund will continue to operate for a very long time.”
Smithers mapped that optimism back to discussions so far at the Sustainable Communities conference. “What we see here today, and what we know through the projects we’ve funded, is that municipalities use this funding to deliver critical support to their constituents—whether it’s for housing, or for community centres like arenas and pools that offer essential services,” she said. “The value to local communities and to constituents is immeasurable.”
[Julie Smithers serves on the community sounding board for The Energy Mix’s Cities & Communities edition, and Energy Mix Productions helped produce the Green Municipal Fund’s annual report last year.]
