Ecology Ottawa was at Environment and Climate Change Committee to speak to the City’s 2026 budget (agenda here). While the City is investing in a variety of measures to reduce GHG emissions and strengthen climate resiliency, these measures don’t go far enough. We propose that the City better engage the community, as they committed earlier this fall.
We invite you to read our delegation below, or watch it here.
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I want to first acknowledge that this meeting was shifted from several days after the budget tabling to now. This is a major improvement on last year, as we’ve had a few weeks, rather than a few days, to study the budget, a change that we requested last year.
It’s difficult to cram everything relevant to this budget into 5 minutes, so I’m going to speak to points in three main categories today: Solid Waste, Trees, and Climate.
On Solid Waste, three specific points. First, we need to increase funding for the green-bin program in multi-residential units to accelerate its roll-out. Our recently released waste audit shows that “the most prevalent divertible material in the garbage stream is organic waste,” and yet “the multi-residential sector recorded the lowest [green bin] diversion rate.” The current roll-out plan extends to 2028; we should finish it in 2026. And organics that end up in landfill are a main source of waste emissions.
Second, we need to fund community groups already doing waste diversion work, as we’ve asked before, and make operations funding eligible. Council has been considering end-of-line waste management approaches, including landfilling and incineration, either of which will cost in the hundreds of millions. It’s critical that we divert as much waste as possible, and community groups are doing the work already—and very inexpensively.
Third, we need a solution to reintroduce school recycling programs; I’m not sure the status of Council’s motion exploring City investments here, but it would be good to see funding supporting this. In general, we urge increasing funding for the reduction and diversion elements of the Solid Waste Master Plan’s Action Suites to accelerate these actions.
On trees, we’re repeating our perennial call for an acceleration of the Tree-Planting Strategy. The recently released Tree Canopy Mapping revealed that our overall urban canopy is decreasing. This when we know that the threats to our tree canopy posed by extreme weather will increase. And the last Urban Forest Management Plan update cited lack of resources for the City’s slow progress on trees.
This brings me to climate—and specifically the Climate Change Master Plan Capital Fund. We of course support the increase to $9 million. Although we’re far off from our net-zero emissions plan: Energy Evolution calls for annual corporate investment of $687 million and much more than that of cumulative community-wide investments. Compared with the enormity of the threat that climate change poses—both its severity and cross-cutting nature—our climate investments remain wholly inadequate. And of course our climate numbers reflect this: the recently released GHG inventory showed that “Ottawa is not expected to achieve the 2025 target of a 43 per cent emissions reduction.” To compound the difficulty, Council has imposed a really inordinate amount of scrutiny on the fund—for example, in demanding a prioritization framework.
In terms of how to spend this fund, we’ve asked staff several times for a breakdown of this fund’s spending, both for the last couple years and for those upcoming, but received no reply. Yet staff’s recently released response to the CCMP Audit stated that “In the 2026 Draft Capital Budget, a dedicated envelope will be proposed to be allocated within the Climate Change Master Plan program account. The intent is to…focus on implementing higher impact initiatives, including piloting innovative approaches with greater potential impact.” So where will these “innovative approaches” come from?
We think the City should engage the community for them—again, by providing funding. Meanwhile, community groups are ready to do this work, and in fact are doing so already. This funding should take multiple forms. First, fund the Climate Public Advisory Group. This will ensure stakeholders can participate to the full extent of their abilities and knowledge.
Second, open funds for community projects in both adaptation and mitigation. We know that much adaptation work must be done locally; think natural infrastructure, like tiny forests or depaving projects or native wildflower gardens. With mitigation, Community emissions constitute 96 percent of Ottawa’s total emissions, and yet the City is struggling to make progress here. Community funding could be administered by established organizations like the Ottawa Climate Action Fund or Ottawa Hydro.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the High-Performance Development Standards that Council already approved but at the last moment, prevented their implementation. Given all the housing development in our future and the household savings that come from improving efficiency, the HPDS are a major opportunity to reduce our emissions and shore up resiliency. Council wanted impact? The HPDS provide this.
Thank you for your attention.
