Tag: Thinking globally

LMLGA 2024

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Last week was the Lower Mainland LGA annual conference and AGM. This is the annual convention of local government elected folks from all of the municipalities and regional districts from Pemberton to White Rock and Hope to Bowen Island.  As I have done in previous years (here, here, here, etc…), I like to provide a bit of a summary of what happened at the conference. Over in my Newsletter I provided a bit more behind-the-curtain stuff for those who want to read that kind of stuff, all you need to do is register here to get the juice directly into your mailbox every Wednesday.

The LMLGA has three main public-might-be-interested parts. We have a Resolutions Session where we agree as a group on areas of senior government advocacy, Panels/workshops where we share strategies and challenges around emergent local government issues, and political speeches from provincial folks. Maybe I’ll talk them in reverse order here.

Unlike previous years, the Senior Government sessions were structured as Q&A sessions moderated by members of the LMLGA Executive, instead of stand-alone speeches. I appreciated this change, especially as it is an election year, and we didn’t want to hear stump speeches, we wanted to hear their party’s approach to issues that matter to our members.

Like previous years, Sonia Furstenau seemed to connect best to the audience. She worked in Local Government, but also has that third-party opportunity to speak truth about power (something I frankly think the Federal NDP could do more of). One favourite (paraphrased) quote: “You don’t run for MLA with the greens if power is your motivating goal.” A policy wonk after my own heart, she spoke to the flaws in the current Carbon Tax regime, issues with the Water Sustainability Act, and the dismal state of the current political discourse, which is eroding much of the ability to get the actual work of governing done.

Also like previous years, Kevin Falcon sometimes missed the mark in ingratiating himself to the crowd in the room. Local government elected trying to get housing built don’t need to be told “bureaucrats” are the problem, or that his experience as a for-profit developer is all BC Housing needs to fulfill our affordable housing needs while suggesting taxes are the reason the $400k townhouses he built in Surrey are now selling for $1M. He also, unknowingly I suspect, countered Fursteneau’s message around public discourse by suggesting “Decorum is great when you are in government, not great when you are in opposition”, following up with a passionate defense of fearmongering as political rhetoric. Meanwhile, there was no representative from the BC Conservative Party at the conference, so I guess he owned that space.

Anne Kang spoke of the work she did over the last year-and-a-bit as Minister of Local Government, including extensive touring around the province to meet with as many leaders of local governments as possible, and her championing for the turning over $1 Billion of infrastructure money directly to Local Governments through the Growing Communities Fund. She also emphasized the increased support her government is providing to Libraries across the Province. She spoke to challenges she hears from local government on the overlapping homelessness, poisoned drug, and mental health crises, though didn’t really get into the discussion about new legislation coming from the Ministry of Housing that is challenging many communities. She was light on new promises (with two more weeks in this session and an election pending), but was clearly very engaged and informed about the issues Local Governments are facing.

There were several Panels this year, but I found the first one the most interesting. The topic was “Public Safety Challenges in Public Spaces”, and I can imagine the direction of the panels shifted several times over the last few weeks, as the conversation province-wide around decriminalization has evolved. The panels was deftly (and very entertainingly) moderated by Andrea Derban from the Community Action Initiative. Her framing of the challenge really set the discussion up: we are at the Moral Panic phase and need leaders to push past that; This is not an OD crisis, it is a toxic drug supply crisis and there are material differences; the data is crystal clear that safe supply is not causing deaths; the people who are dying are not who you first think, and that flawed assumption is in the way of us saving lives.

The panelists included a police member from Abbotsford talking about their revised approaches to addressing mental health and addictions issues as health issues, not criminal ones, and collaboration with businesses being impacted by people seeking shelter. A Fire Chief from Surrey talked about their Second Responder program (which I wrote about New West adopting here) and signs of its success. Councillor Nadine Nakagawa spoke of our Three Crises Response Pilot and other work the City of New Westminster is doing. My phone lit up when she was speaking about it with texted questions from our colleagues about the Pilot, from how we paid for it to how we are measuring outcomes.

There were some take-aways around the need to collect data on measures we are taking – New West again providing the example of our Second Responder and Pilot Project both include collaboration with academics to measure outcomes). But it was Andrea who told us we need to tell better stories (“compassionate, evidence based, action-oriented”) about who is being impacted, and what success looks like.

The resolutions session is where resolutions from member jurisdictions are put before the membership for support. If endorsed, they effectively call on senior government for anything from policy changes to financial support for various causes. This year there were 60 Resolutions considered (you can read them all here), including the following 6 submitted by New Westminster:

R3- Additional Funding for Overdose Prevention Sites:“…be it resolved that UBCM ask the Province of British Columbia to increase funding for Health Authorities to augment existing, and to open new, supervised consumption and overdose prevention sites, including related inhalation services, across British Columbia and including local governments which do not currently offer this service to residents”.

This was endorsed by the LMLGA executive, and then endorsed by the membership On Consent. This is actually a pretty significant and clear message to the province that the municipalities of the Lower Mainland want to see harm reduction in every community.

R4 – Eliminating Barriers to Publicly-Owned and -Operated Home Care Services and Long-Term Care: “…be it resolved that UBCM ask the Province to eliminate financial and accessibility barriers by investing in more publicly owned and operated and not-for-profit home care services and social supports required to age in place, and by further investing in publicly owned and operated and not-for-profit long-term care to ensure seniors are well supported in the continuum of care.”

This resolution was endorsed by the executive, but was pulled from consent to facilitate an attempt by some members to amend it to also call for more public funding for for-profit care providers, which was wisely defeated when folks argued effectively that the intent of the motion was to build capacity in the public provision of seniors care, as the Seniors Advocate is asking for. The main motion was then supported by membership.

R11- EComm Governance Review: “…be it resolved that UBCM ask the provincial government to engage local governments in a comprehensive review of the governance structure and delivery model of 911 emergency call taking, related non-emergency call taking, and emergency dispatch services across BC with a goal to assure reliable, affordable, and sustainable services for all communities”.

This was also endorsed by the LMLGA executive, and then endorsed by the membership On Consent. It’s clear that much of the province is frustrated by escalating EComm costs and continued failure to meet the expectations of the community. The clear support for this motion is perhaps a bit surprising because EComm currently belongs to Local Governments, and this could be interpreted as us asking the Province to step in and take the management of it over – to upload the problem.

R34 – Creating Safer Streets for Everyone with Intersection Safety Cameras: “…be it resolved that LMLGA and UBCM call on the provincial government to expand the implementation of speed and red light intersection safety cameras in local governments across BC, prioritizing intersections near schools and those with a high rate of crashes that result in injuries or fatalities as identified by ICBC, and that the provincial government provide all revenue from additional speed and red light cameras to local governments as grants to be invested in implementing local and safety improvements;
And be it further resolved that the LMLGA and UBCM request that the provincial government allow BC local governments to install speed and red light cameras at their own cost and set and collect fees directly to be earmarked for road safety improvements”.

This motion was debated well by the members, as was a similar one from the City of North Vancouver that didn’t include the mention of school areas. It was supported by a healthy majority of the members, which reflects the current public opinion about speed and intersection cameras – the majority support them.

R48 – Allowing Local Governments to Apply Commercial Rent Controls: “…be it resolved that UBCM ask the Province of British Columbia to provide local governments with the legislative authority to enable special economic zones where commercial rent control and demo/renoviction policies could be applied to ensure predictability in commercial lease costs, so local small businesses and community-serving commercial tenants can continue to serve their communities”.

This motion was also well debated by members, after being motivated by Councillor Henderson. In the end it was supported by a thin majority of the members. I might expect this one will not do as well at UBCM, but that is some advocacy work we need to do.

R56 – Creating a Ministry of Hospitality: “…be it resolved that UBCM ask the Province to create a Ministry of Hospitality to support and engage restaurants, food service vendors and the hospitality sector generally by acting as advocates within government for policy development and reform”

This motion arose out of advocacy from the BC Food Service Association’s “Save BC Restaurants” campaign, and lead to an interesting debate, but was ultimately defeated by a slim majority.

One more bit of voting news was that Ruby Campbell was elected as a Director at Large of the Lower Mainland LGA. This continues the tradition of Lorrie Williams, Chuck Puchmayr, and myself in representing New Westminster on that executive.

Finally a major part of this, like any conference, is the opportunity to network with leaders from around the region. We can laugh about our horror stories with the only cohort who really understands, learn from each other by sharing successes and challenges, and remind each other that we aren’t alone in this work. As it seems the media is filled by stories indicating (to quote my friend Mary) “we are not always sending our best”, it is great to connect with some of the most dedicated, serious, and accomplished people doing this work for all the right reasons.

COP28 part 3

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I have written a couple of posts now on New Westminster’s presence at COP28, and the experience of the Local Climate Action Summit. I’m going to try to wrap up this series pulling highlights and major themes that came out of the event instead of daily run-down, because this blog series is already 5,000+ words and because there were a LOT of topics covered and incredible speakers:

Aside from the LCAS, every day had overlapping conference events at different locations; it was simply impossible to attend them all. I spent some time at Bloomberg Green Forum, at the Canada Pavilion, at the Urbanization Pavilion and EU Pavilion, and other event sites. My criteria for choosing what to attend was partly geographic (see my first post about the expansive site), but I tried to attend events that spoke to local climate action (inspiration!), financing the transition (where’s the money?), innovation in electrical grid upgrades (very relevant to New West), and “Just Transition” discussions that spoke to what that means in the “developed world” context (this is one area where, interesting enough, the US is way ahead of Canada in many ways).


The global challenge to get a new energy grid built was an interesting theme. A place where some technical challenges need to be solved (and a better place for our innovation investment than CCS in my opinion). The core of the issue is that the world needs increasing amounts of electricity, and the cheapest ways to generate electricity, by far, are solar and wind. However, these sources rely on an integrated grid and grid storage technology that has technical, logistical, and even jurisdictional barriers to implementation. Coal and gas are dirty, and increasingly expensive, but they are easy, so the Global South and most rapidly-growing economies are still seeing them as a viable way to achieve their development goals. The grid is the problem, and there are lots of people looking to fix it, but will it be a public grid? (more on that later)


The Canada Pavilion had some interesting sessions. Don Iveson (former Mayor of Edmonton) led a panel on Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy (where I first heard the term “mutli-solving the polycrisis” as a description of local government climate response, and I will be repeating it) that included the Federal and Provincial Environment Ministers, along with local government represented by FCM and the Mayor of Regina. One interesting framing presented was that Climate Mitigation is primarily an energy problem, where Climate Adaption is primarily a water problem: drought and flooding are the two horsemen of this new apocalypse for Canadian cities. Rest assured, the message to the feds out of this conversation was (am I getting repetitive?) local governments are on the frontlines, and can do this work, if given the resources.

Another excellent presentation at the Canadian Pavillion was on the integration of land use with climate action, addressing how local government land use decisions impact our climate goals. Here I met Serena Mendizabal from Six Nations in Ontario (alas, 2023 Mann Cup Champions) who is doing interesting work bringing First Nations into the energy transition space, and developed a Just Transition Guidebook to help guide governments toward more meaningful Indigenous involvement in local climate action.

As I mentioned earlier, there were some sessions I attended with City Staff, and some where we went our different ways to cover more ground. The more technical aspect of staff’s work here really benefited from their ability to network with their cohort across North America, and even Europe and South America. They also had a chance to get facetime with FCM staff who hold the strings to the Green Municipal Fund, and staff in both the Provincial and Federal Ministries. That relationship building, and the ability to share our successes and our challenges – and demonstrate to them that we are a City committed to doing the work – will pay back in a huge way as staff move forward in implementing the Seven Bold Steps in New Westminster.


On our final day, I attended the Ministerial Meeting on Urbanization & Climate Change. This is where we stood (well, sat) shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the LMGA constituency to make our calls to the collected Ministers of Environment and negotiators from national governments around the world. In a weird coincidence, as I recently wrote about him in my Newsletter (subscribe here!), I sat next to Ravi Bhalla, the Mayor of Hoboken (the “New Westminster” of the New York Metro Region) during this session. I have already mentioned the Call to Action and Open Letter in the last post, so won’t repeat that here, but the dialogue with this group of Ministers was promising.
Also on our last day, we were able to attend the daily briefing of the Canadian negotiation team. This is where the representatives of the Canadian government (Minister Guilbeault and Canada’s Chief Negotiator Michael Bonser) update invited attendees on where the negotiations are, and then spend most of the hour taking questions from the audience. In the room were several stakeholder groups, including Elizabeth May (I didn’t notice any other federal party representatives, but I would be surprised if they were not there), representatives from Provincial Governments (again, I didn’t notice any BC Provincial elected types, though I assume staff from the Ministry of Climate Action and Environment were present), Labour groups, business constituencies, and activist groups. I’m not sure if it is a coincidence or a sign of something different happening in Quebec, but the activist questions to the Minister and negotiation teams were mostly delivered in French.
This was a really informative session for me, and gave insight into how the sausage of putting language to these international agreements is done. They spoke of early success (the Loss and Damage Fund secured on day 1), the failure to secure a food systems agreement, and the role the COP President had put on Canada to “find a landing zone” on Fossil Fuel phase-out (which even given hindsight, is not clearly a win given the weasel words included). Being Canadian, the most common answer to questions from the floor (which were almost all asking for more aggressive action and for Canada to lead in calling for it) was some form of “Yep, we hear you, that is consistent with our position, and we are working on it”.

The feelings brought home from 6 days at COP28 are complicated, but can be summed up in the Good, Bad, and Concerning.

Under “Good”, I am left with the positive feeling that local governments are On It. There were so many examples of local governments and inspiring local leaders doing to the work and building sustainable cities through a Just Transition lens. It was constantly repeated (and I’ll repeat here) that urban areas represent 80% of global GDP and 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and we are at the front line of climate action. At the same time there is pressure from the grassroots for local governments to meet and exceed Paris targets, because local governments from Langkawi to Bogota know that the actions needed to meet targets are the same actions that are going to make our cities cleaner, greener, more healthy, and more affordable to operate and protect.

On the “Bad” side, I don’t leave the conference convinced we were going to make it. I didn’t feel the national governments feel the same urgency that the scientific community is telling us we need. They all speak of concern, we heard many give addresses, from the Prime Minister of India to the President of Kenya and the King of Tonga, they all spoke of urgency, but then the language informing the negotiations gets much more nuanced. The timelines offered for fossil fuel phase-out (with even that bet hedged by talking “unabated emissions” and reliance on the CCS pipedream) or ending the construction of new coal power generation felt unambitious when the gavel fell on the 12th. The Global Stocktake told us clearly that the timeline for 1.5C is passing us by, and 1.77C might be the new ambitious target, and I’m not even convinced our collective national governments are there yet.

The “Concerning” part is a bit more about the nature of the conversations at so many of the panels and workshops, and this speaks a bit to the large presence of Global Capital in the room. There is a strong  neo-liberal drive to get private capital involved at every level in the transition, especially in the Global South, where transition plans seem to bypass any public ownership of life-sustaining assets. I’m not a global finance guy, and cannot pretend to be, but a new language of colonization is apparent when we hear the entire conversation about reliance on private capital from Europe and America in the desire to build a modern energy grid to serve Africa, where wind and solar resources are ample, but the lack of a grid is a real development bottleneck.

The media and pundits loved to criticize the Oil Industry lobbyists being at COP28, but we all know what their game is. Everyone knows there is no viable path to a sustained climate unless we end the unabated emissions of fossil fuels, so let the producers hear that and be part of that conversation. It is the ubiquity of private capital from the Global North that is seeing a profit opportunity in energy transition in the South that is more concerning to me – as the language sounds just as extractive as past colonial discussions of the Global South. Maybe I’m too cynical, but when talk of Africa arose at COP28, at times it sounded like a new Berlin Conference. And with so much of the LGMA conversation about Just Transition and the need for climate solutions to also solve deep inequity problems, I cannot help but wonder how we will solve inequity through the privatization of – or the keeping private of – the next generation of public goods.

This stood in contrast to the LGMA call for local and indigenous-informed action, and maybe that is where I will close this too-long reporting out, quoting Call to Action 10:

Pursuant to their budgets, legislative and executive actions, and leadership mechanisms, subnational governments are publicly accountable institutions. Through the acknowledgement of their role in the Paris Agreement and Glasgow Climate Pact, they also play a key role in driving and engaging their communities into global action. From business to parliamentarians, from civil society to academics, from trade unions and farmers to indigenous communities, from faith groups to generational and gender equality advocates, we invite all stakeholders to consider their subnational governments as their ally in responding to climate emergencies.

COP28 part 2

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

In my last post, I wrote about how New Westminster was invited to COP28, and what the landscape of COP28 looked like. In this post I am going to write about the role of Local Governments at the event, and detail the Local Climate Action Summit that opened the conference.

The invitation came from ICLEI, which was the key coordinator of the LGMA (“Local Governments and Municipal Authorities”) Constituency to the UNFCCC. They worked with two other organizations, C40 Cities (who managed the travel logistics of Mayors and senior staff from more than 100 cities around the globe) and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. This is already a long series of posts, so best to follow the links if you want to know who those organizations are and why they exist.

The goal of the LGMA is to influence the UNFCCC negotiations, empowered by the preamble of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which calls on all levels of government to work together, and the Multilevel Action Roadmap put together in 2019. As a Constituency, we put forward a COP28 Position Paper (link here) with a 10-point Call to Action that is delivered to the national level government negotiating teams. The hope is (as is spelled out in their mandate) that these Calls to Action will be integrated into the deal that is struck by the end of COP28. This Paper and an accompanying Open Letter (link here) is delivered through a Ministerial Meeting, but before that, we had a conference to attend.

For us Local Government types, the first part of the COP28 program was a two-day conference-within-a-conference called the Local Climate Action Summit (“LCAS”). This was held in several sites within the COP28 Blue zone, but focused on a pavilion called the LCAS Hub. The LCAS was hosted by the COP28 Presidency, as a part of the commitment the UNFCCC has made since the preamble to the 2015 Paris Agreement to include all levels of government in addressing climate change. COP28 represented the first ever LCAS, and it was opened by the COP28 President Dr. Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber, by the Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, and the Chair of the Board of the C40 Cities (and former Mayor of New York) Michael Bloomberg.

The attendees of the LCAS were Mayors and senior Climate Action staff from several hundred cities around the world. There were local governments from every continent, ranging in size from megacities like Rio De Janerio to small cities like Yellowknife. There were perhaps a half dozen from Canada, with New Westminster being the only municipality in British Columbia represented. The program was intensive and pretty typically conference-like with panel talks, some interactive table-top learning sessions, and lots of opportunity to network and share with local leaders from across the globe. I can’t write everything here, but I will try to summarize a few key takeaways.

In his opening remarks, Secretary General Guterres talked about the importance of this COP in it presenting the first Global Stocktake, while making it clear that conferences aren’t the solution to the existential threat we face, only local action will get us there, and local governments are key to that. Urban areas are where 80% of global GDP is produced, and where 75% of global greenhouse gasses are produced – cities are where the environment and the economy overlap. At the same time, this is where the impacts of climate disruption are being felt the most – floods, droughts, heat waves, and climate-driven human displacement are all impacting urban areas. Cities are the front lines of this battle, and must be the front line of the transition. Most importantly, local governments are closest to the people governments serve and understand the context of change for their community in a way national governments cannot. So while national governments can make deals and drive policy changes, the only way they will achieve on their promises is if they support (and fund!) the local level governments in doing the work.

Panel discussions were as varied as the Cities represented. In Tokyo, the feeling was that solutions will be found in technology (“SUStainability + HIgh tech = SUSHI” was the Japanese tag line). The dynamic and brilliant Mayor of Bogota, Claudia Lopez, spoke of the need for Climate Justice to empower people in need through the transition. There are economic and empowerment benefits to be found in transitioning to low-carbon cities, especially in the developing world and global South. These opportunities need to flow to the many marginalized and under-supported people seeking opportunity in those cities if we hope for the transition, and the communities, to be sustainable. From Cordoba, Argentina, we heard about programs to empower and train youth to do the physical work of transition – from converting streetlights to LEDs to developing stronger local food systems within communities and keep money flowing within the local economy. Most agreed local governments were doing what national governments simply can’t, and were doing it faster than national governments can even imagine.

It was interesting to converse with the Mayor of Copenhagen, and hear their presentation as one of the “Coalition of High Ambition Actors”. On the face, the numbers for Copenhagen and Danish cities sound impressive – they are on target to reduce GHG emissions by 76% (from 1990 levels) before 2030, and 97 of the 99 largest municipalities are on the same track (compare that to the New West and CleanBC Goals of 30% – 50% by 2030 depending on the sector). However, this is driven mostly by the decarbonization of their electricity sector – they are closing coal plants and phasing out all other fossil fuel generation. Compare this to a jurisdiction like BC where 99% of electricity is already non-fossil-fuel, we are not ever going to match their “reduction” numbers. (for context, Danish net GHG emissions per capita are about 10T/yr, compared to about 12 for BC). At the same time, Mayor Haestorp-Andersen was a bit envious of BC’s LGCAP program, by New Westminster’s access to Low Carbon Fuel Credit funding and a climate levy to fund climate action, and even of BC and Canada’s (perhaps tepid, possibly tenuous?) Carbon Tax models. Senior government funding of local climate action is one place we in B.C. are leading over even progressive and high ambition jurisdictions like Denmark.

A theme across many cities was cars, and this is a place we are definitely NOT leading in BC. The transition to EVs is a distraction to the need to shift how and why we move across urban space. In Bogota (where car free days are not just a block party, but occur city-wide), they are serious about the redistribution of road space and are investing in all alternative modes. Mayor Hidalgo of Paris spoke of the “peaceful revolution” happening on the streets of her City as active transportation is taking the space away from congested traffic, with massive air quality, noise pollution, and safety benefits coming on top of GHG reductions. The Mayor of Tirana framed the automobile as anti-child when so much more is spent by his residents on cars than on children – many in his city were spending 30% of their income “raising a car”. He said when he was young, they threw out the Communist dictator, tearing down his statue from the centre of the City, and previously-unheard-of private ownership of automobiles became a symbol of their new freedom. Now, the car itself is the new dictator lording over the centre of the City, preventing them from having the freedoms and economic prosperity they seek. Erion Veliaj, welcome to the War on Cars.

There is another tell in here – “removing cars form the roads” is the almost universal metric in assessing climate action. City X talks about planting Y number of trees, and calls it “equivalent of removing 10,000 cars from the road”. City A builds a new waste resource recovery plant that captured biogas “equal to taking 50,000 cars off the road”. Once your ear is tuned to it, you hear this measure everywhere. This is perhaps unconscious jealousy of places like Bogota and Paris, where they skip the middle man.


The conversations were wide-reaching, but always seemed to come back to youth. One of the quotes stuck on my brain was “Youth don’t believe in action plans, they believe in action”. From Makati to Missoula, there were stories of youth driving climate action in local communities, calling for climate justice, and seeking support to get more work done. This is not an unfamiliar theme in New West, and I was able to share the stories of Babies for Climate Action and the Monkey Rebels, two local ad-hoc organizations centering youth and pushing us towards more aggressive climate goals, while also holding our feet to the fire to achieve them. As part of an Innovation Studio workshop for Mayors, we were given some tools to better understand a 3C “Codesign – Coproduce – Cogovern” model of engagement, effective at giving youth the opportunity to learn and be active in designing the city of their future. We also learned of a fund available to help finance this work (we’ll see if we can tap into that here in New West). In the meantime, I am going to think more deeply about my role as Mayor in empowering young leaders in our community to replace action plans with climate actions.

The LCAS was intense, and a conference worth the time to travel to on its own. In my next post, I’ll try to sum up as briefly as I can the rest of the COP28 program for local governments, and leave you with some thoughts about the good, the bad, and the ugly of COP28.

COP28 (part 1)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Back in early November, I received an email invitation out of the blue from two organizations called C40 Cities and the ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, asking if I wanted to join the LGMA Constituency at COP28 and attend a Local Climate Action Summit as part of COP28. It was so out of the blue that I joked to my EA about it – could you imagine going to Dubai? – and dismissed the invitation pretty quickly.

However, this was followed by an invitation to attend a webinar put together by the ICLEI to learn about the LGMA, the LCAS program, and the role of Local Governments in the UNFCCC process. Hardly a lark, this was an opportunity for our small community to represent British Columbia local governments at an international table, and an opportunity for City Staff to connect with and learn from their cohort around the world. Once I learned that New Westminster’s participation (along with that of ~100 other local governments from around the world) would be sponsored by the C40 Cities Leadership Group (meaning it would not cost the City for me and city staff to participate), I started conversations with City Staff that led us to decide it was a good opportunity for the City, and something we should participate in.

As with most of what I do in this job, I want to use this blog to write about the job, and to open up for folks a bit of how government works and the things local government can and does achieve. In this case, I also got a little glimpse into how International government works, and it was not all that inspiring, but I’m already getting ahead of myself. COP28 occurred in the first week of December, and I finally had a bit of downtime over the Christmas Break to write about this, and that means it went long. So this quick report-out has turned into a series of blog posts about the COP28 experience: The inspiring part (local governments kicking ass!), the less inspiring (national governments writ large), and the terrifying (the neo-colonial solution space).

The 28th Conference of the Parties was a lot of different things, all happening at the same time in the same place. Central to it is the meeting of National Governments from around the world under the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) process. This part is a bit obscure to most people in its function, but is also the source of all of the headlines. As a Canadian, and a designated member of the LGMA (Local Government Municipal Authority) Constituency to the UNFCCC process, I was able to attend briefings by the Canadian negotiating team, and was able to take part in the Ministerial Meeting on Urbanization & Climate Change which was the LGMA contribution to the negotiations (more on that later).

COP28 is also the world’s biggest professional conference of the world’s leaders in addressing climate action, including national and subnational government representatives and people in the public service, private industry, and the non-profit realm who do this work professionally. That is a huge breadth of work, and the conference program is huge. At times I attended events along with a City staff member; at times they had parallel programs and interests that better aligned with their work, so we went separate ways to cover more ground. There were scores of parallel conference streams that attendees could move between, which requires a bit of a discussion of the geography of COP28.

The main conference was held at “Expo City”, which was the site of the 2020 World Exposition in Dubai. This includes one of the largest Convention Centre sites in the world, surrounded by acres of buildings and pavilions like you would expect to see at a World Exposition. To put in a Vancouver perspective, imagine if Expo 86 was still set up and spread across all of False Creek, with a convention centre twice the size of the Vancouver Convention Centre in the middle of it.

This site was divided in to two parts. The “Blue Zone” required UNFCCC accreditation, and was quite secure (metal detectors, ID verification, etc.), and the “Green Zone” that was open to the public. The Blue Zone is where all of the national and theme pavilions were and where the main conference Plenary is held. Walking around the Blue Zone (as we did a lot to get to different talks) felt a bit like walking around a big University Campus, with the surreal United Nations feel – you might walk past the President of France and his entourage, physically bump into Mark Carney as you are rushing around a corner, or see someone you know from SFU searching for the same pavilion as you (all three of these literally happened to me one day, within an hour of each other). And though it was a “secure” area, it was also the site of various protests, as various coalitions of groups pushed the assembled leaders for more climate action, for climate justice, and the end of fossil fuel extraction.

The Green zone was less busy, but was similar in layout. This is where you found a strange amalgam of non-profits, activist groups, and private industry interests set up to talk about and hawk their wares. There was a significant public participation component, lots of educations resources, and much better food offerings than within the Blue Zone.

Finally, COP28 is also a large trade show, and I am going to lump together both large non-profit and social enterprise organizations and the corporate sector here in the spirit of brevity. Several pavilions at the main conference were set up in themes, such as “Empowering the Energy Transition” or “Multilevel Action and Urbanization”, and you will have GE selling wind turbines, major European Capital Funds looking to invest in development of new technologies, Social Enterprises seeking funding for new work in the developing world, and everything in between. I didn’t spend as much time in these spaces, but there is no doubt in looking at the scale of these displays that “Climate Action” is big business.

As COP28 was so big, there were also some parallel programs happening at other sites in the city, and the use of Metro Transit was free to all accredited COP28 attendees. Most LCAS participants were housed in a hotel about an hour from EXPO City by train, and I could go off on another entire blog about the speed, headway, cleanliness, and crowdedness, of Dubai Metro, but suffice to say most of what I saw of Dubai proper was seen at 70kkm/h out the window of a light rail train while straphanging with COP28 participants from around the world and the million young guest workers who keep UAE running.

And with that stage set, my next post will cover the special role of local governments at COP28.

Year of Work

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Last month I wrote a blog post marking the one-year anniversary of the 2022 election that was mostly personal reflections and not about the work we did in Year One. Now that we are on the one-year anniversary of the new Council being actually sworn in, a bit of a summary is apropos. As I worked on this, I realized there is a lot to talk about, so I need to edit it down a bit and gather by themes. So this is more a list of highlights than a complete catalogue.

Inauguration
We swore in a new Council on November 7th, 2022, bringing in one of the bigger change-overs in recent years. Best I can tell, it has been more than 25 years since we had this large a change-over with a new Mayor and 4 new Councillors elected in the same year. This meant that onboarding for the new members (myself included, because the Mayor role is very different than the Council one) dominated the first few months of work. We held long onboarding seminars and site tours with staff getting everyone as up to speed as possible on everything from how the municipal budget works in reality (very different than how it works on some election platforms!) to details on the various areas of service delivery the City performs.

Following on this, we developed together and adopted a Strategic Priorities Plan that I wrote about here. It has the regular priority stuff – transportation and housing and asset management – but I am more proud in how Council came together to center the residents and communities (yes, plural) we are serving in this plan, and to emphasize community connectedness as a priority. This is what makes New West special, and what will truly address many of the challenges we face.

Housing Approved
The City continues to lead on housing policy, signing housing agreements on almost 700 new Purpose Built Rental units, and giving final approvals to 244 student apartments, 50 supportive housing units, more than 150 new townhouses and about 50 other units in several medium-density forms. We waived Public Hearing on projects promising more than 400 more rental units, and dozens of townhouses because they were consistent with the Official Community Plan and public consultation showed strong support. We are also working through initial phases of several larger developments in the City, as we strive to (and are so far successful at) meeting our Regional Growth Strategy targets. We are still struggling to get 24/7 shelter, transitional and supportive housing funded in the City, even those that we have approved, and continue to balance putting the pressure on provincial and federal purse-string holders while we work with them at the staff-to-staff level to develop fundable projects.

Crises
We have been proactive at addressing the overlapping crises of homelessness, mental health, and addictions that are challenging every municipality in Canada. Back in December, we brought in a Downtown Livability Strategy to coordinate efforts between staff from Community Planning, Economic Development, Engineering, Fire Services, Integrated Services (“Bylaws”), Parks and Recreation, Finance, and Police and added some resources to address general hygiene and cleanliness issues. We have continued to partner with Fraser Health, the Canadian Mental Health Association, BC Housing, and service agencies working downtown, have secured $1.7 Million from the federal Building Safer Communities Fund, $1.2M from the Provincial Government to support our groundbreaking Peer Assist Care Teams, $50,000 from the provincial Ministry of Public Safety to set up Situation Tables and Collaborative Public Safety Programs. We have also launched a new Homelessness Action Plan working with our partners in the Homelessness Coalition.

Staff have been working hard and making progress with the resources available to them. Just last week, we committed to a plan to increase these resources and set up a new structure to assure we are leveraging community partnerships and coordinating our lobbying and communications efforts to best serve the entire community.

It is a difficult time for many in our community, and everyone deserves to feel safe and supported however they live in this community. We are committed to a compassionate, evidence-based approach to addressing the needs of those most at risk, and to address the externalities related to too many people not having access to the dignified supports they need. We have also supported the building of new supportive housing in the community – recognizing the real solution to homelessness is safe and secure homes.

Capital Projects
Our Capital Plan is significant. The biggest item being təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre – a more than doubling of the recreation and aquatic space provided by the old Canada Games Pool and Centennial Community Centre, and the first Zero Carbon recreation centre of its kind in Canada. Considering that procurement and construction occurred during massive construction inflation, the regional concrete strike, unprecedented supply chain disruptions, not to mention a global pandemic, delivering this project within a few months of planned opening, and within 5% of the budget is a significant achievement. We are not across the finish line yet, but opening is planned for the spring, and that will be a great day for New West.

Flying under the radar a bit was a new $28 Million substation in Queensborough that we cut the ribbon on a few months ago. Not only will this provide secure long-term electrical reliability for rapidly-growing Q’Boro, but the Electrical Utility delivered the project for $2 million under budget, saving all city electrical ratepayers money. Serious kudos to the team who delivered this project.

You also probably noticed there have been a lot of roads torn up over the last year, mostly in Sapperton and the West End. This is the result of many overlapping utility renewal projects by the City and Metro Vancouver, with some of it supported by a $10.4 Million Investing in Canada grant from both the Federal and Provincial governments. Building a City is project that never stops, and we are investing more than ever on things that matter to the quality of life in this community, like sidewalks and trees.

Reconciliation
A Year of Truth is ground-breaking work on uncovering the history of colonization in New Westminster. We are informing a truth-based dialogue about our shared history with the original inhabitants of these lands to inform a more genuine approach to reconciliation. A new relationship with the 6 Host Nations, and a new commitment to co-develop the replacement of Pier Park in a vision shared by the original inhabitants of these lands and the community. This is sometimes challenging work, but we are leading with clear principles, and our entire community will be much stronger for having had these discussions, for having taken the time to listen and to learn. Only once we have truth can reconciliation begin.

Resiliency
Over the last year, we have seen a massive all-department response to the Heat Dome disaster of 2021. Our Emergency Planning staff have partnered with Fraser Health and Senior Services Society to identify and directly support vulnerable residents, have surveyed and identified the most vulnerable buildings in the City and initiated a One Cool Room program. Our Electrical Utility is augmenting the province’s free Air Conditioner Program with an enhanced program for New West residents. Our Parks and Engineering teams have brought a new emphasis on public cooling stations and relief centres to address the bad days when they come. Meanwhile, we continue to advocate to senior government for regulatory changes that will reduce the risk to vulnerable residents in the future.

We have also initiated a new Flood Resilience Plan that adopts the recently-updated 2050 Fraser River Flood Profile to address climate-change driven freshet changes and sea-level rise to the middle of the century in Queensborough, in the Downtown ,and the Braid Industrial area. We have been successful at pulling in senior government funding to support pump station and dike upgrades in Queensborough. This plan will help us direct the next phase of investments.

Climate
We have adopted new Zero Carbon Step Code levels that incent the building of new homes that are both energy efficient and zero carbon, a major step towards our 2030 and 2050 community greenhouse gas reduction goals. We made a major shift in minimum parking requirements in new buildings around Skytrain and frequent transit, to reduce the cost of building new homes and better support transportation and climate goals. Meanwhile, we have been putting together a decision making framework to prioritize spending of the Climate Action Reserve to assure we get the best bang for the buck as we apply that reserve to items in our capital plan that move the needle on climate emissions reductions and climate resilience. We also supported youth leadership in our community by adopting a 15-Minute City Strategy which will guide future development and planning.

Partnerships
As Council prioritized building strong relationships with organizations doing good work in the community, we have put this in practice. This includes building a stronger relationship with Sahib Sukh Sagar Gurdwara through shared emergency management strategy and resources. We are strengthening our relationship with Urban Indigenous residents and Indigenous Youth through partnership with Spirit of the Children Society through Truth and Reconciliation Day and hosting an Every Child Matters sidewalk mural in the centre of our Downtown. We cut the ribbon on the new K.I.D.S. Childcare space in Queensborough – a partnership between the development community, the City, and the Province bringing much needed childcare spaces to Queensborough. We supported seniors advocacy in our community by adopting recommendations that support dignified and affordable Aging in Place after a request from representatives from Century House. For the first time, we recognized Transgender Day of Visibility with flag raising and lighting up City Hall, and were the first BC City to recognize Ethiopian Day by raising the Ethiopian Flag at Friendship gardens and invited representatives of the local Ethiopian Community into City Hall to share food and ideas. Just today I attended the New West Hospice Society dialogue on Death and dying at Century House- an incredible and meaningful collaboration between the City and two volunteer-driven organizations in the City that are making our community stronger.

We also hosted the Mann Cup! OK, Council didn’t get them there, but it was a memorable event that fills me photostream for the year. One thing this Council did to to help was to designate the ‘Bellies as an Event of Municipal Significance, which allowed for a shift in how they manage their liquor license. This helped facilitate a partnership between the ‘Bellies and a local brewery, and providing more secure funding for their operations though an exciting payoff run.

Arts, Culture and Economic Development
Council made a $20 Million investment in the repair and upgrade of the Massey Theatre so this artistic jewel of the community can continue to thrive for another generation. We also secured a long-term operational agreement with the Massey Theatre Society so they can transform Massey Theatre into a multi-purpose arts centre called 8th and 8th Arts Spaces.

Meanwhile, Council initiated downtown renewal plans, including advocating for a Vacant Commercial Property Tax at UBCM, and adopting a new Retail Strategy to be implemented in 2024. We have also adopted a new Site-Wide Liquor Licensing policy to better support major festivals in the City. We have renewed our our Economic Development Advisory Committee by recognizing the importance of Arts and Culture in this space, and expanding the mandate of the committee to include it.

Engagement
We have launched several public engagement opportunities, from the development of a new Queensborough Transportation Plan to the visioning of the 22nd Street Station Area. We are also launching an innovative Community Advisory Assembly model of engagement, where a council of community members that represent the diversity of our city can weigh in on issues important to the community.

Incomplete as it is, for the first year of a mostly-new Council, I am pretty happy with this list. There are also many things that Council has expressed interest in working on that we have not really started yet. It’s a busy time in the City, in every City when I talk to me colleagues around the region, and we are still in a place where we need to balance the desire to get lots of things done while we are challenged for resources and staff are already fully tasked, and then some. Council recognizes that this work is being done by more than 1,000 hardworking people in City Hall, the Works Yard, the recreation centres and out in the community, and their dedication is appreciated.

It has been a year of excitement and frustrations, and more than one distraction, but the work never stops. Building a City is not a job that is ever completed, nor is it something a Mayor can do – it requires a team effort. I am so fortunate in this role to have a great team surrounding me, doing the work to make New Westminster more active, more connected, and more nurturing. I’m looking forward to what we can accomplish in 2024.

Year one

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

It has been an intense fall in the work/life balance front, and I almost forgot that I should probably mark the date on the calendar – one year since the election of 2022.

I haven’t had a chance to sit down and think about what “one year” means. I often feel dates like this are arbitrary, and so much of the important work we do in the City is incremental and based on long-term and system thinking that it doesn’t lend itself to tracking arbitrary dates. I also recognize years-in-review suit the listicle thinking of modern communications. However, I am instead going to do a bit of public self-reflection instead of talking about accomplishments that I might share with my incredible Council Team and the staff of the City. Maybe those will come in a follow-up.

Yesterday I spent several hours at the New West Fire and Rescue Open House at Glenbrook Fire Hall. Doing what I occasionally do – sitting in a booth taking questions from everyday folks, hearing concerns and talking about the City and the work of Council. One of the most common questions (after “are you really the Mayor!?”) is something around the theme: “What’s it like to be Mayor?” or “Is it what your expected?” or “How are you enjoying it?”

I usually quip an answer around “I’m experiencing it, that’s for sure” (chuckle), because it is hard to describe what something is like when you are so immersed in it, and it is hard to remember what I expected before I got here. The line of questioning does inspire some thoughts that are probably appropriate to go through after year one and it almost looks like a listicle.

First off, it is busy (and busy is rarely a good thing).

An interesting shift from time on Council to this job is how more all-encompassing this job is, and I thought Council was intense. The challenge is when things are coming at you in a constant stream, it is hard to know what actually needs current attention and what needs to be ignored – or what you can afford to ignore. If you are always reacting to what just arrived, you never have the time to do any long-term planning, or to concentrate on a single thing for a long enough period of time. The risk is you slip into a mode where you are reacting instead of thinking or planning.

There are many ways this manifests. I cannot possibly reply to every email I get, and can only reply to very few in timely and meaningful ways. I like replying to emails, and feel most people deserve a thoughtful response to their concern if they took the time to write. But there is only so much thoughtful time in a day. This is why I simply don’t have time to write blogs like I used to. I committed to the Council reports, but the longer discussions about bigger topics are just too hard to take the time to sit down and write.

As for the constant small decision making, it can get tiring, mostly because of the vast array of topics the City’s work touches. It seems every decision requires a shift in gears – from discussing sewer grants to community consultation scheduling to housing advocacy to discussing sidewalk repairs to flag raising events or parking rules – you never know what you will be asked next. It is exciting and dynamic, but at the end of the day, it is exhausting.

Secondly, it is at times emotionally difficult.

Bad news is all around us; global bad news and local bad news. Some I have no control over, while some are right in front of me. There is also some over which I have limited control, but have a responsibility to address. There are no two ways about it, some people in our community are suffering. Some lack a home; some lack support for their health care needs; some lack resources to feed and fully care for their family. These residents are not abstractions, they are people I see every day and talk to when walking around the City. The idea that I carry a Naloxone kit in my walks should be terrifying, but instead it is banal.

I was pointed to a radio show last week where people in my community with power and voice used those privileges to contribute to the stigma thrust upon the most vulnerable members of this community. Conflating not having a home or living with an addiction with criminality. Dehumanizing the people who most need help in our community. Framing them as the problem and propagating untruthful messages about the actual problem while providing no solutions. This both angers and saddens me, and I struggle to find a positive response, because the dehumanization is the entire point of that narrative. Separating community into “us” and “them” gives people reason to not care about their neighbours and makes it harder to build support for and do the work we need to do, stops us from acting with the optimism and hope we need to make a positive difference in our community.

Fortunately, it is also rewarding.

There are algorithms culturing negative narratives in social media and shock radio, but talking to people in the community gives such a different impression of what this community is and aspires to be. I sit at the Ask Pat booth or run into people on the Quayside or at the Brewery, and people love New West. Overwhelmingly, people appreciate the work the City is doing during challenging times, love our spaces and places, and like the balance we strike in NewWest. There is optimism.

This is shown by the growing number of young families settling here, by the way people show up when events occur, and by how engaged folks are at community meetings like last week on the 22nd Street Plan. It also shows up in the public surveys and polling where we find (for example) that the vast majority of New West residents feel safe in this community, and appreciate the way we find balance in our annual budgets.

When people come to me and say “thanks”, be it for the support their organization received or because they had a good experience at City Hall or just because they got their question asked at the booth, it is nice to be able to be at the receiving end of gratitude for the work that many, many people do together.

And it is Uplifting.

I have said it so many times over the last year, this community is about connections. There are so many people and organizations doing good work in this community to lift their neighbours, it is hard not to have a full heart. Sports clubs, social services, arts groups, businesses and non-profits, collections of caring neighbours, and staff in the city doing the everyday work of keeping the community moving forward.

This Friday after the radio made me grumpy, I attended the New Westminster Homelessness Coalition Community Party, where there was food, music, prizes, and the laughter and conversations of people getting together for no other reason than to be together celebrating community. After this I rushed up to the Massey Theatre for the launch of the 20th(!) annual Cultural Crawl where artists and art lovers from across the region gathered to support one another and showcase the talent in our community, and our MLA spoke eloquently about the importance of art in bringing community together at the toughest times.

There was no being grumpy after this.

One year in, we have a lot of work to do, but we have also done a lot of good work. We face challenges in our community, in the province, around the world, but we have made progress on many fronts, and can see the path forward to a community where more of our residents can thrive and live their best life. We need optimism and hope to do that work.

So I’ll close by thanking you for the work you do in your own community (however you define that) to make it stronger. It might be taking the time to be a good parent, it might be attending yet another strata meeting to talk building envelope. It might be supporting a local business or helping with a charity, or doing your little bit to make a community event happen next year. Thanks for being part of the great fabric of New West.

Ask Pat: 4Qs on EVs

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

JP asks—

I’ve got questions about electric vehicle infrastructure. I read this morning that 3/5 BC residents intend for their next vehicle to be an EV. This along with the current target from the federal government to phase out new non-electric vehicle sales by 2035, has me worried that our city isn’t prepared for what I anticipate will be an imminent influx of demand for electric vehicle infrastructure. I also want to note that if I were to own an electric vehicle, driving to a charging space, leaving it there for a couple hours, then going and moving it once it’s charged, just doesn’t meet my expectations of reasonable infrastructure. So I have a few questions.
1. Are all new residential builds being required to have electric charging available for their parking spaces? If not yet, what steps are being taken to move in this direction?
2. If a rental building or condo tower does not have sufficient energy coming to their property to support adding EV charging to their parking spaces, what incentives are available to upgrade this infrastructure? Are there things the city can do to help move things in this direction?
3. What is the city’s strategy for electrifying their fleet of vehicles?
4. What percentage of new parking spaces being built by the city (ie at the təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic centre) are being equipped with EV charging?

That’s a lot of questions, and I held off on answering them for a bit because I knew the City’s eMobility Strategy was coming to Council, and I didn’t want to jinx any parts of it before adoption by getting ahead of it here. But this question now gives me a good chance to talk about that strategy, which I only mentioned in my Council report last week when we adopted it. That strategy answers some of your questions, but not all of them, so let’s go through these by number:

1: Yes. In 2019, New Westminster made it a requirement that all new residential buildings be ‘EV Ready’. This means every parking stall includes an energized outlet that can accommodate a Level 2 EV charger. There is no requirement to install the charger, as we fully expect the technology at the end of the wire will continue to evolve, both in the types of chargers and the energy management systems attached to them, but having a hot wire in place for every parking spot removes a big barrier to home charging for multi-unit residential buildings.

2: Yeah, this is a challenge. Something like 60% of New West residents live in existing multi-family buildings where charging infrastructure is limited or non-existent. To meet our 2035 goals for EV use, the vast majority of these will need to be EV ready. The eMobility strategy includes the exploration of financial incentives to “top up” those already available from the Provincial Government and Federal Government to facilitate retrofitting charging infrastructure into existing buildings. There may be some Community Charter issues with direct subsidies from a City to do this, but we also have a role in facilitation and setting up more streamlined permitting and inspection processes. This is a work in progress, with relatively high priority.

3: As fast as possible/practical is the strategy. It is laid out in some detail in our Corporate Energy & Emissions Reduction Strategy (“CEERS”). Vehicle emission represent about 40% of current GHG emissions from City operations, (“Corporate Emissions”) and the CEERS has us reducing these by 30% by 2030. The City has various fleets, and there are two things setting the pace of our transition: the availability of zero emission alternatives on the market, and the ability to support the EV fleet with charging infrastructure. We want to optimize the latter so we are ready for the former, if that makes sense.

Light vehicles are relatively easy and we are generally replacing vehicles as they age out of the fleet with electric alternatives. Larger vehicles are, for the most part, just not available. Electric regular-duty pickups are achingly slow getting to the market, and larger vehicles like dump trucks and trucks that can push a snow plow still seem very far away. In the meantime, we have strategically replaced a few parks and engineering service vehicles with smaller specialty electric ones, and are already ahead of the curve on “fuel switching” such as displacing diesel with propane where appropriate, which can reduce emissions by something like 30%. The transition in police vehicles in also a challenge in North America for reasons that are unclear to me, so the shift in the short term is to flex-fuel and hybrid options. Electric firetrucks are a very exotic item right now. So we are shifting when we can, but we are honestly waiting for the technology to catch up in a lot of sectors.

The CEERS also includes some significant trip reduction policies for staff, and as technology allows, we are shifting a bunch of non-vehicle equipment from hydrocarbon-burning to electric.

4: I don’t think that has been decided yet. Indeed, the future market for charging in public facilities like this is a topic of some debate. With the hopefully-rapid deployment of residential charging, the introduction of similar workplace charging requirements, and the ongoing improvement in battery technology and reduction in range anxiety, there remains a question of what role widely-distributed public charging will have in the decades ahead. There will likely always be a place for some public level-2 type charging, and perhaps a greater need for Level 3 rapid-charge facilities for a user group that puts a tonne of mileage on vehicles, but 100% charging at every public parking space is probably not a useful way to invest limited infrastructure money, and will do nothing to fuel the transition to EVs. So a building like təməsew̓txʷ will have some EV charging stations, but I do not know the type or how they will be allocated.

That all said, the transition away from internal combustion cars will not only include swapping them out for EVs. If we are going to meet the Climate Action goals of the city, of the province, and the country, we need to re-think urban mobility. The future of transportation is not just electric, it is shared (more electric Public Transit!) and it is distributed (more Micromobility!). So the eMobility Strategy also talks about how we are going to make the use of emergent transportation technology work better in New West. This means assuring we have the right kind of road and curbside infrastructure to make micromobility safe, and it means advocating to senior governments to change our archaic Motor Vehicle Act and other legislation to make active transportation safe and comfortable for all.

There are a lot of opportunities for a local government to make long-term investments here, and we need our upcoming Community Energy and Emissions Plan to dovetail with this eMobility Strategy. This is also why the City has set up a Climate Action Reserve Fund to help us efficiently manage the various funding sources available to us (such as the new provincial Climate Action Program and assure we are investing in the infrastructure that gets us the best bang for our emissions-reduction buck.

This is an area where there is a lot happening right now, and during the Decade of Climate Action, municipalities are at the forefront, and are redefining their core functions. Not only because local governments (with less than 10% of the tax revenue of senior governments) are responsible though our infrastructure and local policies for more than 50% of all emissions, but because we know the infrastructure we invest in now will save us money and emissions in the decades ahead.

Earth Day 2022

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

In the zeitgeist of these times, one’s opinion about a day celebrating the intrinsic value of the planet that sustains us is probably influenced by the flavour of political leadership you prefer. But one thing that seems to bridge all political divides is the idea that trees are good things. That having more trees is better than having fewer trees. That we want to live near them and have them live near us.

So I want to mark Earth Day 2022 talking about trees.

We had a little event in Queens Park today, where Acting Mayor Nakagawa, the federal Minister of Natural Resources and the provincial Minister of Energy, Mines, and Low Carbon Innovation celebrated new trees in an established forest (more about why that is important below), and it gives me an excuse to talk about optimistic leadership.

The proverb is that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is today. There is nothing more hopeful and optimistic than planting a tree. We know the benefits of the tree will not be enjoyed today, that the shade of the tree will not be provided for a decade or more. It takes years for the full noise-abatement, flood-prevention, air-cleaning, habitat-restoring, fruit-providing, carbon-sequestering values of a tree to be realized. The planning here is well outside of any election cycle. So it is an expression of hope to commit to, to fund, to plant a tree you may never sit in the shade of.

In New Westminster, we are planting trees like never before. Literally thousands of them. Our Urban Forest Management Strategy is in the rapidly-getting-trees-planted stage. Concentrating first on currently under-shaded neighbourhoods like the Brow of the Hill and Queensborough, the City is protecting established trees on public and private property, requiring new plantings on development lands, and (most importantly) planting new trees on City-owned lands, including parks and boulevards.

The reason we had Ministers in Queen’s Park on Earth Day in 2022 was around two great programs happening right now. Both are supporting our Urban Forest Management Strategy, and both are supported by valuable external grants we were able to secure to make New Westminster (literally) greener specifically because we have these clear strategies and goals.

The first is our program to restore natural areas in our parks with native plantings, supported by the Tree Canada National Greening Program. Through that program, we got assistance to support the restoration of the ground level of some of our established forests, such as in Hume, Glenbrook Ravine, and Queens Park. These are areas where the tree canopy is well established, but old. These “single generation” forests are majestic, but when the trees are not diverse and are all the same age, they become susceptible to disease, and are not buffered for natural secession. By changing the ground-level conditions and introducing both young trees and other ground-cover, we build a more robust and healthy forest. This makes the big trees healthier, and assures that we will have younger established trees to fill gaps when older trees naturally age out of the forest. This program will see 25,000 saplings and plant plugs put in the soil in 2022!

You may have noted the signage around Queens Park where these areas are being restored. The signage is there to help people understand why we are asking people to not walk or ride their bikes through these area, and to keep your dogs out of there, so the new plants and restored soil can do its thing:

The second program is a more city-wide Urban Reforestation and Biodiversity Enhancement Initiative. This is the result of a $1.7 Million grant from the (federal) Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program and (provincial) COVID-19 Resilience Infrastructure Stream (ICIP – CVRIS) grant programs. This is going to fund a huge amount of our target tree planting for 2022 and 2023, and allow us to establish a new 1-hectare pollinator pasture in the City.

We are on pace, thanks in part of these types of grants, to beat our target for 10,000 established new trees in the City by 2030. We know this is not the complete solution for climate disruption, but along with our ongoing efforts to reduce our corporate and community GHG emissions, we recognize that sequestration through trees will become an increasingly important part of reducing atmospheric GHG. At the same time, they make our community a more livable place. If we maintain the momentum of the last couple of years, we will exceed out Urban Forest Management Strategy target of 27% forest canopy cover by 2035, and this will be a completely transformed City by 2050.

There are ways you can help out! As important as they are to our long-term goals, new boulevard trees do not, unfortunately, have a 100% survival rate. The boulevard is a tough place to be a young tree. There often isn’t a lot of soil to hold water over dry summers, dogs pee on you, things bump into you, and there is little protection from wind, hard sun, and other indignities. We plan for some attrition with new plantings, but you can help reduce that rate and increase the chances that the lovely new tree near your home joins the ranks of the established. You can become a Tree Steward by signing up to Adopt a Street Tree! See the details here.

This can be your non-partisan Earth Day gift to the planet that sustains us, and to a generation you have not yet met who will enjoy the shade your tree provides in the decades ahead. Happy Earth Day.

Ask Pat: War on Gas?

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Happy Family Day Weekend. It gave be a chance to catch some breathe and look at my Ask Pat queue. The first one I found is pretty long, so I edited it back a bit and will break it into three parts:

FossilFool asks—

Hi Pat, I’ve been inspired and challenged lately by the book, A Good War, by Seth Klein, about how we can look to how Canada responded to WWII as an example of how we could mobilize the country to respond to the climate emergency like an actual emergency.

Not a question yet, but let me interject to say: Me too! I have not only read it, I have marked up, flagged, and taken extensive notes about it:

I did this because I had the challenging job of interviewing Klein as part of the 2021 Lower Mainland LGA conference. The book is incredibly well researched, and so full of both historical facts and compelling ideas that engaging the author in a conversation about it is a bit intimidating to a lowly Earth Scientist. But it definitely tells a different story that we usually read about WW2. Not of the soldiers that put on uniforms, but of the leaders in government and in industry that saw an existential threat and – in less than a year –  completely restructured the Canadian economy to address that threat. Perhaps as amazing (and I’d suggest a better comparable to the Climate Emergency as we come out of a global pandemic) how once the threat was abated, the country immediately and completely restructured its economy once again to stop making so many weapons, and to instead assure people had education, jobs, homes and pensions in the post-year period.

The historical record is amazing, and Klein does a good job drawing parallels (and addressing contrasts) to the current existential threat, and does not leave the question of why we are unable to respond as we did then unexplored. Perhaps surprisingly non-partisan and clear on the positive role capitalism can play in driving change (though he spares little empathy for neo-Liberalism), he nonetheless makes a clear case that it is only bold leadership that is missing. It’s a good read, and a good message.

It seems clear that we need to get off of fossil fuels FAST to really make any significant impact in slowing/limiting climate change. The City of Vancouver has some ambitious goals to get homes to switch entirely away from natural gas, and I’m wondering if other municipalities like New West will soon follow?

Some municipalities like New West are signaling that goal (see Bold Step 3: Carbon Free Homes and Buildings), but Vancouver is in a unique situation, which is why this is an area they are able to take real leadership. Because of their unique enabling legislation, the Vancouver Charter, that City has the ability to regulate its own building code. That means they have the authority to say “we will not permit gas appliances in new builds”. New West and other Municipalities do not have that power. We would need the province to grant us this ability.

Lacking this stick, we still have access to some carrots. This means local government programs to coordinate or add to senior government and industry incentives to switch to electricity. We can also use the greater flexibility in the Step Code to incent change to carbon-free energy. The Step Code is a provincial energy efficiency standard applied to new buildings. Local Governments have the authority to choose which “step” new buildings have to meet, each higher step meaning higher efficiency of the building, but also meaning higher building cost and possibly other compromises in the design of the building. A creative use of the Step Code would allow builders to build a less efficient building (therefore saving money) if they choose only non-carbon appliances for the building. The resultant building may use a bit more energy over its lifetime, but with New West’s electricity effectively zero-carbon, this might be a good bridge to accelerate the transition off fossil gas. This is the path New West is following, starting with “Part 3” buildings, and (knock on wood) coming to other building types soon:

I checked out the EnergySave New West page and can see that there are a bunch of rebates being offered for energy efficiency upgrades, but I was surprised to see that many of them are actually incentivizing changes that still rely on natural gas. If we need to get off of burning fossil fuels period to address climate change, why are we still talking about energy efficiency upgrades that don’t actually achieve that? I’d love to get your thoughts on this. Thanks for your time and for your great blog!

Yes, there are still incentives for people who want to get more efficient gas appliances such as modern furnaces and instant-water heaters to replace hot water tanks. Energy Save New West points people at incentives offered by the City and those offered by the Province, BC Hydro, and Fortis. Though the City does not specifically incentivize gas appliances, we do point people to incentives that exist to encourage them to install more efficient gas appliances.

The debate about whether “more efficient fossil gas appliance” is an appropriate idea right now in light of the climate emergency is definitely a live debate. I know where Seth Klein would fall on this, and I might lean that direction myself. But there are specific and financial barriers to some people going full electric right now, and the gap is not filled by available incentives. For someone with a gas instant water heater and gas stove, switching to electric may require significant upgrades to the electrical system in the house to accommodate the high amperage demands of those appliance types, and a new line and transformer connection for the house at a cost much higher than the appliances themselves. Providing incentive to reduce overall gas use still pays GHD reduction dividends, but I hear you about the incrementalism.

We need to get off fossil gas, and I’m afraid programs like 30by30 are at best stop-gaps until we get to that point, at worst speedbumps slowing that transition. Through my work as the Chair of the Community Energy Association, I have seen first hand how Fortis (who is one of our members) has tried to define and redefine what its role is in this seemingly inevitable transition. They are indeed pushing the envelope on the efficiency of gas for buildings, including a pretty remarkable Deep Energy Retrofit program with serious resources behind it. But I sense a more fundamental shift in their business model is going to be needed if they want to prosper through this time.

That said, I have also noted how BC Hydro has adopted a bit of a cheeky attitude when discussing the need to transition from gas to electricity:

As we have all learned by now, by the time any public debate gets to the TwitterSnark stage, the solutions will soon be in hand. Right?

Ask Pat: flood plans

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

BillB asks—

If my reading of the City of New West website is correct, the Floodplain Management Strategy – Feasibility Plan is 10 years old. It also says that the City prepares for the possibility of flooding on “an annual basis”. In the light of recent floods in the area, and climate change at large, should New Westminster be doing more to prepare and prevent the likelihood of flooding?

The short answer is probably yes, in that recent events from the Heat Dome to the Fraser Valley flooding has demonstrated that there are gaps in local and regional emergency response schemes, and it might be worth a pretty comprehensive review. But I’m going to put that larger “emergency management” part aside here, because you asked specifically about flooding. I think we are in pretty good shape for the *likely* flood scenarios in the near future, but it gets murkier the further out we look.

As a caveat, I’m a geologist and physical geographer by academic training, but I am not an engineer. That means I know a little too much about the physical causes and mechanics of flooding (I can wax eloquently about Reynolds Number or identifying back-basin deposits in the rock record) but not quite enough about the engineering practice of managing floods. So nothing below here should be thought of as engineering advice or advanced engineering knowledge. You gotta pay somebody with a P.Eng. for that.

The Floodplain Management Strategy really addresses one type of flood risk we have in the City, that of freshet flooding of the Fraser River. We have another couple of risks not directly addressed by that strategy: seasonal or flash flooding on the Brunette River, and localized intense storm events like recently occurred causing minor localized flooding on Quayside Drive, which I would call “upland” floods, because they are not caused by the river rising so much as water not getting to the river fast enough. They all need different approaches, and the risk factor of each will be impacted differently by Climate Change.

As far as the Fraser River flood, this is the area I think we are most prepared for in the medium-term. The oft-mentioned survey of dike conditions report from a few years ago, circulated more widely during the current Fraser River flooding episode, makes New West look pretty good, comparatively. The Crest Elevation and Dike Assessment ratings are generally fair to good, comparable to Richmond and very far ahead of most other municipalities along the river. There has been a lot of work done since that 2005 report to improve both the dike (mostly along with new adjacent developments) and the ability to pump water out and over the dike during intense rain or if there is some local wave wash overtopping during a Freshet flood event. Just in the last couple of years, we have spent millions on upgrading the Wood Street and Boundary Road pump stations to bring them up to modern capacity need and seismic standards.

That said, from a geography sense, Fraser River freshet floods are not likely our biggest concern on this lower part of the river. Here, the water height varies more by tide and storm surge cycle than by freshet cycle. The concern to plan around is not a single spring freshet that is larger than others (like the 1894 or 1948 floods), but a significant low-pressure storm coming though during a king tide around the time of higher-than-average freshet. It is perhaps macabre to think about it, but am 1894-style freshet will likely cause dyke breaches from Hope to Langley, and this extra water storage capacity on farm land and in those more vulnerable communities may serve to reduce the danger further downriver like Queensborough and Richmond. Dike planning needs to be holistic and address the entire estuary, and that is the most common call for every community along the Fraser. There is even a model in place, we just need to fund it.

The Brunette River is a bit more complicated. It has a different freshet than the Fraser River and it is more prone to intense local storms, but the lower reaches are also impacted by flood stage in the Fraser. There are very few homes impacted by a Brunette River flood, but the Braid Industrial Area may definitely be affected, and there are areas of it not protected by any meaningful dike. This is an area where the City puts a lot of emphasis on tiger dams and sandbags if floods are predicted, but the complexity of the jurisdictions here (rail lines are federally regulated, cannot really be “raised” and rail beds are pretty permeable to water; a large part of the waterfront belongs to the Port of Vancouver, so we couldn’t dike it if we wanted to) meaning proactive measures are much harder to coordinate.

Upland floods from intense storms are much harder to predict, and the engineering solutions are daunting. There is only so much underground storm sewer pipe capacity, and though we are currently investing a lot of money in new storm sewer infrastructure, there is always a cost/benefit math around adequate capacity for very low-recurrence events. We are also investing more on “green infrastructure” such as groundwater infiltration, permeable surface treatments and trees, in hopes we can locally capture more of the storm water and reduce the “peak” of the most intense storm flows. But none of this fits in the Floodplain Strategy.

Where the report you read talks about “annual basis” planning, that means every year (starting in the late winter) we get regular updates on snowpack and predicted melt rate across the Fraser River basin. That is modelled into predicted flows in the month ahead, and we prepare flood response based on those numbers. If the freshet forecasts start to look floody, we start procuring and organizing response materials (tiger dams, sandbags, sand, pumps, etc.) well ahead of time. In my perhaps hazy recollection of 7 years on Council, we have gone so far as to deploy sandbags in the Brunette River area once, and had no river-sourced flooding. So the “annual basis” is around temporarily protecting low-lying areas and prepping for a flood if it is likely to occur, and in no way replaces the medium-and longer term dike upgrades, pump capacity, and storm sewer investments we need to do.

Now, about Climate Change. In general, engineering practice now accounts for it, in as good as they can. Though that means different things for each of the different risks. Add to this a major challenge of estimating or modelling the various impacts Climate Change will have on everything from local storm intensity to snowpacks in Cariboo.

The current models suggest intense rainfall events and rain-on-snow events will become more frequent in our part of the world with climate disruption, both likely to increase the frequency and possible intensity of upland floods and Brunette floods. I guess the upside is that these are likely to be more localized with limited damage (which doesn’t make you feel any better if it is your home or business that is local damaged).

Research from a few years ago (and I honestly have been not keeping up, so this may have changed) suggests that peak freshet flows in the Fraser may actually be lower on average, even as annual average flow goes up a bit over the next 75 years. So floods that meet our design levels may actually become less frequent.

The problem is, we are in the tidal range of the river, and sea level rise will most certainly impact New Westminster. The current Provincial Guidelines are to design dikes for a 50cm increase in sea level, putting dike standards where we previously expected sea level change to get by 2050. More recent research (for example, by the Research Council) suggests we will be past there by 2050. The detail of raising dikes an extra 50 cm is actually not a small one, but at least New West is not alone in this. Which is why many communities (including New West) are calling for a return to basin-wide flood and landuse planning along the shores of the Fraser River Estuary in a FREMP-like model as I linked to above.

The elephant in the room is the worst case scenario, and this is a global concern, not a New Westminster one. If we have 50cm of sea level rise by 2050, we can and are planning for that. Some of that adaptation will be expensive, but we can see how to get there. By 2050, we should have an idea of how to address 1m sea level rise anticipated for 2100, though that will bring new engineering challenges, and perhaps some uncomfortable discussion about triage: what lands we protect, what lands we abandon. However, worst case scenarios for sea level rise past 2100 are dire, and frankly very difficult to plan around. The planet with 3m of sea level rise is a very, very different planet. Most major cities are at least partially inundated, most currently ports are no longer functional. The global economy is not the one we have today. From an engineering perspective, this is not something we can plan for, and the people planning today will not be the ones planning for that eventuality.

This is why we still, while facing inevitable climate change, need to work to reduce the scale and impact of climate disruption. The battle against Climate Change is not over because it is now inevitable, the race is now afoot. Every tonne of carbon we keep out of the atmosphere today is a reduction in inundation we will see post 2100. So in that sense, our long-term flood management plan is probably best seen here.