Communities need affordable climate solutions, the solutions themselves need long-term political continuity and support, and city staff should be bold in putting them forward, participants heard on the first morning of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Sustainable Communities Conference in Fredericton, NB.
“We need solutions that include everyone, especially the most vulnerable, to ensure they aren’t left behind to bear the brunt of climate impacts,” Wetaskiwin, Alberta city councillor Gabrielle Blatz told a panel session where duct tape emerged as an all-purpose metaphor for energy efficiency and other affordable climate solutions.
And as municipalities large and small continue implementing climate solutions, “we have to ensure that costs are not offloaded to municipalities” that are “held accountable to our ratepayers and our taxpayers and our communities,” she added.
The duct tape comparison came from Abhi Kantamneni, director of action research at Efficiency Canada, who described energy poverty as “really the sum of all social and economic inequities that you can address by improving energy efficiency.”
Just as “energy efficiency is underutilized sometimes,” Kantamneni said duct tape “gets a bad rap” because it sounds like a temporary solution. And yet, “it’s versatile,” he told participants. “It can apply to a whole range of problems. It’s also very cost-compatible—it can help other tools be more effective. It’s so strong you can pull a car out of a ditch with just duct tape. And yet it’s delicate enough that you can pull it apart with your fingers.”
Similarly, “energy efficiency can be there, but the challenge is that not every Canadian has the same access to it.”
Sheila Murray, project manager at Community Resilience to Extreme Weather (CREW) in Toronto, said back-to-back extreme weather events in 2013—a major summer flood, followed by a severe ice storm just before Christmas—created momentum for local conversations about climate change impacts and adaptation. CREW spent eight months working with seniors in high-rise public housing and other lower-income rentals, developing a protocol for weather emergencies while encouraging volunteers to knock on doors and meet their neighbours to get more people involved.
In the end, “the protocol is so simple I can sum it up very quickly—it was ‘meet in the lobby’,” she said. “It sound ridiculous,” but residents are now “informed and educated, they have expert help in emergency preparedness, they know who they are, and there’s a broad social network they work with. So that if something has gone wrong and they’re worried about it, they know their network leaders will be in the lobby waiting for them and they’ll take whatever action is necessary.”
The experience brought home the message the “social infrastructure is essential to the work that CREW does,” Murray said. “The rest is tools and methods, but the social infrastructure is the central piece” that “can also build out a sense of belonging in community”—an essential gain wherever tenants face the same deep challenges as the 19-building St. James Town district in Toronto.
Brett (Hetxw’ms Gyetxw) Huson, research associate at the Prairie Climate Centre, urged municipalities to adopt planning practices that look beyond their official boundaries. “A lot of the time, decisions are made that only think of municipal borders and don’t think of watersheds or the impacts of those decisions on Indigenous communities,” he said. He cited Winnipeg as a community where decisions on flood protection ended with nearby First Nations being displaced from their homes for years.
Panelists agreed that for local climate solutions to endure, they need long-term continuity—the session heard stories of promising initiatives that went through years of planning and development, only to lose momentum or stop completely when their elected champions left office.
Those initiatives also depend on effective communication between city staff and elected councillors. Later in the session, Kantamneni asked Blatz how staff can approach councillors to gain the “freedom and flexibility” to make local climate solutions a priority. Blatz said it’s up to councillors to create “spaces where people feel comfortable coming to us with their ideas…we need to make sure we’re helping them grow, giving them the space to be creative and not be shut down.”
She also urged staff members to “be brave. If you know there’s something that is pressing for you, something you’re passionate about, don’t be scared to bring it up. We want to hear those big ideas. The worst thing someone can tell you is ‘no’, so why not just take the leap of faith and do those things and see what pans out for you?”
Huson said climate response should be embedded in “every single policy” within a municipal government—and if the conversations are getting tough or scary, Indigenous communities have the perspective and past experience to help. “If we talk about being brave, sometimes we just have to do things, make change, and incur the discomfort, incur the cost,” he said.
“What’s really important about having Indigenous peoples participating is that you’re going to hear from people who’ve been forced to incur the cost and incur change on their land in the past 150 years that has been so drastic, so obliterating,” he added. “So we know what this crisis is like. We can help mitigate that. We can help with the anxiety of it and with how to guide through the change…It’s important to have these perspectives as part of what we all do.”
