Update: Committee members voted 11-5 in favour of the recommendations (watch voting here). The recommendations now go to Council for its consideration. Please contact your councillor and the mayor to voice your support!
Ottawa City Council's Environment and Climate Change and Emergency Preparedness and Protective Services Committees met today to discuss staff recommendations for amendments to the City's Idling Control By-law (no. 2007-266). Ecology Ottawa made a delegation, supporting staff's recommendations and adding a few of our own to better reduce our GHG emissions and Ottawans' health—especially that of our most vulnerable.
You can read our delegation below, or watch it here.
As a bonus, Dr. Thomas Walker of Carleton University, also gave a delegation in which he shared information from our 2023 Breathe Easy report, in which he played an integral role. Watch his delegation here.
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Thank you for the opportunity to address you.
We think these recommendations are headed in the right direction. A shorter permitted idling time means less air pollution. This means progress toward our commitment to zero emissions and improvements to public health. The durations proposed are well supported: scientifically, they’re based on guidelines from Natural Resources Canada, and politically, the survey showed that most Ottawans are in favour. Lower limits will also help bylaw officers improve the bylaw’s poor enforcement levels. The additional restrictions on idling at temperatures below and above the primary range of 0 to 27 degrees are also common sense and should be supported. Of course, there will be cases where idling is necessary, and staff have reviewed and revised the exemptions, in consultation with various groups.
These recommendations are therefore an easy win. This is also an opportunity for Ottawa to catch up with peer municipalities: Toronto, Burlington, Kingston, and Vancouver, for example, all have comparable restrictions. Indeed, it would be disappointing to fall behind, as we have so lamentably with our High-Performance Development Standards, our curbside waste disposal, and our Climate Change Master Plan. In short, this is an easy win.
We do have a few additional recommendations.
First of all, we call for no exemptions in school zones and other areas with high concentrations of vulnerable people, like daycares, seniors homes, and so on. The only obstacle for this in school zones the report mentions is school buses, which require idling for their operation. If this is the case, then permit only school buses to idle; but we must not subject kids, with their fragile respiratory systems, to the harmful toxins in exhaust. I should note that had the City answered our years-long call for the school bus fleet’s electrification, this wouldn’t be a problem.
We also think signage should be erected in these areas. While certainly right-of-ways have lots of signs, signage for standing vehicles is of course different from signage for moving vehicles: in short, one has time to read the sign because one is stopped. We understand that signage entails a cost; but what’s the cost of deploying bylaw officers? And more importantly, what’s the cost of subjecting our kids’ lungs to the toxins in exhaust?
I’ve mentioned the health effects of idling a couple times, and we have to wonder: why is there no mention of Ottawa Public Health in this report? Idling often occurs in areas with high pedestrian traffic. Shouldn’t OPH have been consulted, and recommendations from them incorporated?
We were also wondering about the fine: it’s currently at $500—but as the report lays out, this is substantially more than our peer jurisdictions, which are more in the $100–$200 range. We know enforcement has been very poor—an average of only 7 citations per year. We ask staff, then: is the fine’s size a factor in this poor enforcement? Would a range make more sense?
And we also find the “technological limitations” cited in the report as a barrier to video submissions by members of the public—that is, the City’s submission system can only receive files of 6MB—a bit problematic. Surely in the twenty-first century, we can find a solution to this limitation.
Finally, we believe that enforcement revenues should be directed to the City’s efforts on School Streets, one of which was piloted in Vanier in February. Not only do School Streets go further to protect kids’ lungs than the idling bylaw, they keep kids safe from the physical dangers of car traffic. (Of course, the Road Safety Action Plan budget would be another worthy recipient.)
In closing, we urge you to take the easy win and approve these recommendations—for our air quality, for our emissions commitments, for public health, even for Ottawans’ pocketbooks.
