At a meeting of City Council's Environment and Climate Change Committee on Wednesday, November 13, Ecology Ottawa called for further funding of climate action in Ottawa, improvements to the City's budget consultation process, and more trees—many more trees.
You can watch our delegation or read it below.
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Our Interim Executive Director William van Geest addressing Council's Environment and Climate Change Committee on the 2025 Budget.
Thank you for the opportunity to address you.
It took some work to be here today. The draft 2025 budget, in all its hundreds of pages, was tabled at last Wednesday’s Council meeting—just four business days ago. Given the budget is Council’s most important annual exercise, and that the tax-supported budget alone is over $300 million, that’s not much time, whether for advocacy groups like ours or even for yourselves.
But even within the hundreds of pages available, it’s tough to make heads or tails of much of this budget. On one hand, we’re offered a small amount of somewhat rigorous information: a few spreadsheets with generic categories like Material & Services, Salaries, and “Climate Change and Resiliency” with no further specification. On the other hand, in the Budget Magazine, we’re offered a few scattered dollar figures for various initiatives. How do these two relate? There are few indications.
I mention these aspects because advocacy groups have for years been calling for improvements to the budget process. A number of these groups are those of the Peoples Official Plan coalition, of which Ecology Ottawa is a member. In a letter to Council last year, this coalition’s 26 groups asked for earlier consultations, meaningful performance indicators, better connections across departments, a citizen working group on budget, and so on. These recommendations have largely gone unincorporated, and here we are with the usual frustrations. Ottawans want to engage deeply on the budget.
Despite these challenges, we do have a few comments on the budget information available.
First of all, the allocation for implementing the Climate Change Master Plan (CCMP) has increased to $6 million. This is another step in the right direction. Does it respond adequately to the Climate Emergency, which Council declared in 2019? Given that Energy Evolution calls for annual investments in the hundreds of millions, it seems like not. And sure enough, at last check, only two of the Plan’s eight priorities are on track—and 2025 is the last year in the CCMP’s horizon. It would be disappointing, to say nothing of a reneging on our own commitments, if Ottawa failed to attain its own goals in this crucial crisis.
Second, this is the third budget in which a “climate lens” is applied. The intent here is obviously good, but the current model is flawed: it only records spending that will reduce emissions. What about those that will increase emissions? This exercise loses substantial meaning if both aren’t accounted for.
There are a few other measures that clearly are on the right track:
- Investments in streetscaping projects for shade and increased rainfall; to whatever extent these involve nature-based solutions, these are great—although we’d love to know more information than is found in the draft budget
- Investments in flood plain mapping with conservation authorities, including of the more severe flooding expected with climate change
- Funds for greenspace acquisition; we were impressed by the recent purchase of 561 hectares of wetlands near Tewin, and this should be continued—although we’d urge the development of interpretative features to educate Ottawans on the rich biodiversity preserved in these areas
- Investments in implementing the Solid Waste Master Plan, particularly for waste diversion; we assume this includes the community grants that over 200 Ottawans asked for via our petition earlier this year
Our final request today: trees. In his mayoral campaign, Mayor Sutcliffe promised to plant a million trees. The Tree Planting Strategy’s Early Actions proposed earlier this year seeks only to keep up with tree loss in the right of way. Funds should be provided so that these Actions’ three-year horizon can be cut in at least half. Trees are one of our best defenses against climate change, whether for climate change mitigation or resilience—and the return on investment is unbeatable. Particularly with the equity analyses proposed in the Early Actions, we’ll know exactly where to put them, and we shouldn’t wait.
Thank you for your attention.
