The Centre for Civic Governance works to support community leadership meeting today’s social and environmental challenges: climate change, Canada’s increasing equity gap, and shifting social trends.
At the Centre for Civic Governance, our goal is to strengthen Canadian communities through sharing best practices, providing tools for locally elected leaders, and progressive policy analysis. We strive to provide knowledge and information to make real and positive social change.
Written by Helesia Luke, an Associate at Columbia Institute.
It’s been a year since a new women’s movement came together in response to the inauguration of the forty-fifth president of the United States. On this occasion, the movement – representing a broad range of grassroots organizations and individuals — organized the first Women’s March in Washington, DC. From there, another 673 marches were held in 85 countries.
The Women’s March in Washington proved to be one of the largest, one-day protest events in history.[i] While some may have thought it was a ‘one-off’ demonstration, organizers around the world plan to prove them wrong with ‘2.0’ planned for Saturday, January 20.
“When we work together, we are better together, and we’ve demonstrated that through both the March and #metoo,” said Samantha Monckton, an organizer of March On Vancouver and March On Canada, in an e-mail to Columbia Institute. “If we can create a supportive place to break the silence, cause change and create action, then we’ve done our jobs.”
Vancouver held its own Women’s March protest in January, bringing together over 15,000 people. And across Canada, over 130,000 people marched from coast to coast to coast in over 40 communities.
One game-changing outcome from the 2017 March may be the uptick in the number of women getting involved in electoral politics. The last provincial election in B.C., which was held a few months after the Women’s March, resulted in the election of an all-time record number of women MLAs – at almost 40%.[ii]
Nancy Peckford, executive director of Equal Voice, a Canadian organization that aims to get more women elected and engaged in politics, told The Toronto Star that she has “seen a surge in women organizing. Compared to previous years more women are signing up for Equal Voice’s campaign boot camps.”[iii]
The spokeswoman for Emily’s List, a US group dedicated to helping elect pro-choice Democratic women to national, state and local office, has reported a significant increase in the number of women getting involved in politics.
In an interview with The Hill, Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock said she’s seeing “unprecedented political engagement from women that started with the Women’s March in response to President Trump’s inauguration… [T]hese women marched, they went home, they organized, they felt that they weren’t alone.”[iv]
March On Canada is a new network that evolved out of the Women’s March movement, formed by a coalition of organizers responsible for leading the Canadian Women’s March in cities and towns across Canada. It is a continuation of the work these leaders did to facilitate the 130,000 people who marched from coast to coast to coast in over 40 communities last January. This year, organizers are anticipating a similar turnout and planning for tens of thousands of participants.
In Vancouver, the March begins Saturday, January 20 at 10am at Jack Poole Plaza – 1085 Canada Place. The March is free and everyone is welcome. For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/marchonvancouver/
What are we doing?
At the Columbia Institute, we know that getting elected for the first time is monumental. We also know that once elected, progressive leaders can find themselves in minority or sometimes even a solitary position at the decision-making table.
That’s where the Centre for Civic Governance comes in. Our annual High Ground Forum for locally elected leaders is a unique place to network, learn about new research, best practice, and build the skills that will help strengthen communities for all.
Written by Charley Beresford, Executive Director, Columbia Institute and co-author of Top Asks for Climate Action: Ramping Up Low Carbon Communities. Image courtesy of Kenneth Mankoff (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) via Climate Visual Project.
(November 11, 2017) – From November 6 to 17, the world’s governments – now including Syria – are meeting in Bonn to continue work on the historic Paris Agreement. New reports tell us that the time for climate action is very short.
According to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), current global commitments are only one-third of what they must be to keep global warming below dangerous levels. Emissions must peak by 2020 and all countries will be called upon to take stock and deepen their commitments.
Canada, while providing a refreshing change in tone and a welcome activist role internationally, lags behind in greenhouse gas reduction commitments. Canada’s targets are insufficient to meet Paris goals. (To be on track, we need to bring emissions per person under two megatonnes. Right now, our footprint is over twenty megatonnes per person.)
Under the Paris Agreement, the opportunity to formally revisit this will come in 2020. In the meantime, there is much work to be done.
In Canada, enhancing the ability of local governments to act on greenhouse gas emissions is both a powerful opportunity and an absolute necessity for meeting our climate commitments.
Local governments, directly and indirectly, influence more than fifty percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and they are taking climate leadership in communities across the country.
But they can’t do it alone. Federal and provincial/territorial governments are critical to ramping up local government action.
Having asked the question ‘what federal, provincial and territorial initiatives would boost local government climate initiative,’ the Columbia Institute’s Centre for Civic Governance released Top Asks for Climate Action: Ramping Up Low Carbon Communities, which laid out 18 federal policies and 24 provincial/territorial policies dedicated to leveraging up local government climate action.
The federal government is off to a good start with a national price on carbon, funding for local government capacity building, a national transportation strategy and matching transit funding to local government priorities. In fact, 28% of our policy asks have been actioned and another 22% are in progress.
But we need to power up our efforts rapidly. The good news is that powering up low-carbon communities also means lots of jobs and the opportunity to address quality of life and equity issues.
So, where can the Federal government improve on initiatives that will enable local governments to realize their climate potential? Here are five key recommendations:
Establish a mechanism that guarantees infrastructure spending won’t lock Canadians into a high carbon path;
Move quickly on deep energy retrofits to achieve substantial market penetration in existing residential and commercial buildings;
Provide all communities with energy, emissions and natural capital baseline data;
Support energy democracy – promote people owned renewable energy generation and keep energy dollars circulating in Canadian communities; and
Establish science-based targets to bridge the gap between Canada’s current greenhouse gas reduction targets and targets that are compatible with Paris Agreement goals.
Significant infrastructure spending has been allocated to address the enormous backlog built up across the country over previous decades. We can leverage this investment to accelerate Canada’s low-carbon transition by linking the spending to projects that will achieve low carbon results. Integrating infrastructure spending with climate goals begins with a GHG emissions profile for each project and inclusion of low-carbon criteria in project selection. That opportunity is here now, and it’s one of the fifty percent of federal climate asks that await implementation.
Giving local government the data they need to develop climate action plans and taking steps to encourage and support individual/aboriginal/ municipally owned renewable energy generation will speed up our low carbon transition and keep local dollars circulating.
Local government leadership has deep potential for meeting our climate change obligations. Let’s ramp it up.
Written by Sue Maxwell. Image courtesy of Tom Clohosy Cole (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) via Creative Commons.
In British Columbia, regional districts and their member municipalities have made great advancements in the past decade on improving compost and recycling options. Diversion rates have also increased. Still, the province needs to do its part to reduce the amount of material moving through the system and mandate producer responsibility. In fact, BC is one of only two provinces in Canada that does not have a comprehensive waste reduction strategy.
Why Zero Waste?
BC’s zero waste business case asserts that despite increased recycling, waste levels continue to rise. Without change, the cost to local governments is forecasted to increase from $377 million in 2010 to $450 million in 2025.[i] The case study also asserts that pursuing zero waste has a positive impact with “new jobs, increased GDP, reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and reduced environmental and human health risks.[ii]”
Too often the impacts of waste are seen merely as leachate, methane and litter from landfills and ash, GHG and air emissions from incinerators. A zero waste focus helps to reduce the multitude of upstream impacts of how we create and use materials. “Only one percent of the total North American materials flow ends up in, and is still being used within, products six months after their sale.”[iii]
When looking at GHGs by system rather than sector, 49% of US emissions relate to the provision of products and food.[iv] Over 7000 new jobs could be created in BC if materials wasted were recycled.[v] Clearly, the status quo cannot continue.
A Call for Action
A group of elected local officials in BC have decided to work together on a call for action with eight recommendations: [vi]
1. Develop and implement a Provincial Zero Waste Strategy. This should be done with strong engagement of local government and using the zero waste hierarchy. It should include actions on communications, education, knowledge building and adequate resources.
2. Enact measures to focus on the higher measures of the zero waste hierarchy. We need policies and incentives to reconsider, reduce and reuse.
3. Enhance existing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programs. EPR programs place the responsibility for the products at the end of life on the producer, which can incentivize design for environment. BC is committed to the Canada-wide Action Plan for EPR[vii] and has implemented many new programs; however, the existing programs need to be strengthened.[viii]
4. Add new EPR programs. BC should fulfill its commitments and map out the next suite of products to be covered, thus giving local governments certainty for their waste planning.
5. Reduce and compost organics. This can include developing and sharing food waste reduction tools, assisting with barriers to composting and researching nutrient circulation.
6. Work with specific sectors. There is a need to develop actions for activities and sectors, such as work camps, large events, wood waste, partnerships with First Nations, etc. that meet the needs of different local governments.
7. Maximize use of existing disposal capacity and minimize environmental impacts. A province-wide look at disposal capacity should assist in setting targets to increase the lifespan of these assets by reducing waste. Collaboration among regions, especially to assist smaller regions, would be beneficial as well as action on illegal dumping. It is critical that no new waste incinerators are built as burning of waste is very expensive, polluting and wastes the energy embodied in products and materials where far more energy is saved through higher steps on the hierarchy. Thermal treatment reduces the volume of waste but still requires landfilling and in some cases, creates more toxic waste. It also can provide a disincentive to reduce or recycle, as certain volumes are required. Waste to energy was seen as the least desirable method in the zero waste business case[ix].
8. Advocate to the federal government for zero waste policy. For zero waste to be possible, all levels of government and sectors need to be doing their part. The federal government can have influence on warranty times, product labeling, trade agreements, fostering design change and banning certain problematic materials.
Hope for the Future
While UBCM has had over 80 waste-related resolutions on specific aspects since 2003, at the recent 2017 convention in Vancouver, a resolution calling for a comprehensive provincial zero waste strategy was passed. It is not only local governments pushing for action on waste, but also citizens and environmental groups concerned about resource extraction impacts, climate change, waste, litter and marine pollution. We eagerly await the Province’s response.
What is Zero Waste?
Zero waste is an aspirational goal like zero accidents, a driver to keep improving systems. The Zero Waste International Alliance has the only peer-reviewed definition:
“Zero Waste is a goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use.
Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them.
Implementing Zero Waste will eliminate all discharges to land, water or air that are a threat to planetary, human, animal or plant health.”
This peer-reviewed aspect is important as some waste management companies try to push alternate definitions that allow for waste incineration with terms like “zero waste to landfill” which can be meaningless. For this reason, a zero waste hierarchy was adopted by the Recycling Council of BC to clearly outline where to focus actions to have the most impact, instead of the all too common end-of-pipe project.
Sue Maxwell is the coordinator for the BC Inter-municipal Working Group on Zero Waste; a councillor for the Resort Municipality of Whistler; a long time volunteer for zero waste organizations and a consultant for over a decade on waste plans, EPR programs, communications, waste reduction and sustainability.
Written by William E. Rees. Image courtesy of Tom Clohosy Cole (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) via Creative Commons.
‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing.
Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake.
The scariest example is the simplistic, growth-oriented, market-based economic thinking that is all but running the world today. Prevailing neoliberal economic models make no useful reference to the dynamics of the ecosystems or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.
What truly intelligent species would attempt to fly spaceship Earth, with all its mind-boggling complexity, using the conceptual equivalent of a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle driver’s manual?
Consider economists’ (and therefore society’s) near-universal obsession with continuous economic growth on a finite planet. A recent ringing example is Kaushik Basu’s glowing prediction that “in 50 years, the world economy is likely (though not guaranteed) to be thriving, with global GDP growing by as much as 20 per cent per year, and income and consumption doubling every four years or so.”
Basu is the former chief economist of the World Bank, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of economics at Cornell University, so he is no flake in the economics department. But this does not prevent a display of alarming ignorance of both the power of exponential growth and the state of the ecosphere. Income and consumption doubling every four years? After just 20 years and five doublings, the economy would be larger by a factor of 32; in 50 years it will have multiplied more than 5000-fold! Basu must inhabit some infinite parallel universe.In fairness, he does recognize that if the number of cars, airplane journeys and the like double every four years with overall consumption, “we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits.” But here’s the thing — it’s 50 years before Basu’s prediction even takes hold and we’ve already shot past several important planetary boundaries.
In fairness, he does recognize that if the number of cars, airplane journeys and the like double every four years with overall consumption, “we will quickly exceed the planet’s limits.” But here’s the thing — it’s 50 years before Basu’s prediction even takes hold and we’ve already shot past several important planetary boundaries.
Little wonder. Propelled by neoliberal economic thinking and fossil fuels, techno-industrial society consumed more energy and resources during the most recent doubling (the past 35 years or so) than in all previous history. Humanity is now in dangerous ecological overshoot, using even renewable and replenishable resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and filling waste sinks beyond capacity. (Even climate change is a waste management problem — carbon dioxide is the single greatest waste by weight in all industrial economies.)
Meanwhile, wild nature is in desperate retreat. One example: from less than one per cent at the dawn of agriculture, humans and their domestic animals had ballooned to comprise 97 per cent of the total weight of terrestrial mammals by the year 2000. That number is closer to 98.5 per cent today, with wild mammals barely clinging to the margins.
The “competitive displacement” of other species is an inevitable byproduct of continuous growth on a finite planet. The expansion of humans and their artefacts necessarily means the contraction of everything else. (Politicians’ protests notwithstanding, there is a fundamental contradiction between population/economic growth and protecting the “environment.”)
Ignoring overshoot is dangerously stupid — we are financing growth, in part, by irreversibly liquidating natural resources essential to our own long-term survival.
And things can only get worse. Even at today’s “lacklustre” three-per-cent global growth rate, incomes/consumption would double in just 20 years and produce — in this century — dramatic climate change, widespread extinctions, the collapse of major biophysical systems, global strife and diminished prospects for continued civilized existence.
But even this threat isn’t enough to move the world community to act sensibly to save itself. Like a mind-altering drug, the compound myth of perpetual growth and continuous technological progress obscures reality. Economists thicken the fog by insisting that the economy is “decoupling” from nature — another illusion resulting from faulty accounting, modelling abstractions and the fudging effects of globalization (for example, wealthy countries “offshoring” their ecological impacts onto poorer countries and the global commons).
The biophysical evidence — that is, reality — shows that material consumption and waste production are still increasing with population and GDP growth. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide is accumulating at accelerating record rates in the atmosphere and the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 sequentially shared the distinction of being the warmest years in the instrumental record.
There is little question that the immediate drivers of overshoot are overpopulation and excess consumption, so there is widespread support for the idea of “clean production and consumption.” What only a few realists are willing to state out loud is that this must soon translate into less production/consumption by fewer people.
But this raises another problem. Thirty per cent of the world’s population are still considered to be “very poor” (living on less than $3.10 per day, purchasing power adjusted) and deserve to consume more.
Meanwhile, ours is a world of chronic gross social inequity. Oxfam recently reported that the world’s richest eight billionaires possess the same wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of humanity — more than 3.5 billion people). The richest fifth of people take home about 70 per cent of global income compared to just two per cent by the poorest fifth.
Such inequality deepens the hole we are digging for ourselves. There may be enough of everything to go around, but greater incomes enable the citizens of high-income countries to consume, on average, several times their equitable share of global economic and ecological output. Meanwhile the poor scrounge for crumbs at the bottom of our Earthly barrel. Even within prosperous nations, a widening income gap is known to undermine population health and erode social cohesion, the contemporary United States being an outstanding example.
Our growth-based, winner-takes-all economy has become egregiously unjust as well as ecologically precarious. Perversely, the world community prescribes still greater material growth as the only feasible solution!
How might a clear-sighted neutral observer interpret our predicament? First, she or he would point out that on a finite planet already in overshoot, it is not biophysically possible to raise the material standards of the poor to those of the rich sustainably — that is, without destroying the ecosphere, undermining life-support functions and precipitating global societal collapse. In a non-deluded world, governments would no longer see economic growth as the panacea for all that ails them; in particular, they would acknowledge that enough is literally enough and cease promoting growth as the primary solution to both North-South inequity and chronic poverty within nations.
Instead, a rational world would focus on devising institutions and policies for co-operative redistribution — ways to share the benefits of development more equitably. The goal should be to enhance the material well-being of developing countries and the poor and improve life-quality for all while simultaneously reducing both aggregate material consumption and world population.
Ensuring a socially just, economically secure and ecologically stable global environment requires: a) that rich nations consume less to free up the ecological space needed for justifiable consumption increases in poorer countries; and b) that the world implement a universal population management plan designed to reduce the total human population to a level that that can be supported indefinitely at a more-than-satisfactory average material standard. This is what it means to “live sustainably within the means of nature.”
Fortunately, various studies suggest that planned de-growth toward a quasi steady state economy is technically possible, would benefit the poor and could be achieved while improving overall quality of life even in high-income countries.
Considering the human suffering that would be avoided and number of non-human species that would be preserved, this is also a morally compelling strategy.
The foregoing diagnosis is anathema to the prevailing growth ethic, the naive fallacy that well-being is a continuous linear function of income, and politically correct avoidance of the population question. Many will therefore object on grounds that the suggested policy prescription is politically unfeasible and can never be implemented.
They may well be correct. The problem is that what is politically feasible is likely to be ecologically irrelevant or downright dangerous. Accelerated hydrocarbon development, better pipeline regulations and improved navigational aids for tanker traffic on B.C.’s coast, for example, don’t cut it as sustainable development in a world that should be abandoning fossil fuels.
The data show clearly that we are at a crucial stage of a slow but accelerating crisis. To be effective and timely, sustainability policy should already be consistent with the real-world evidence. Nature can no longer endure the consequences of “alternative facts.”
Failure to implement a global sustainability plan that addresses excess consumption and over-population while ensuring greater social equity may well be fatal to global civilization. Indeed, adherence to any variant of the growth-bound status quo promises a future of uncontrollable climate change, plummeting biodiversity, civil disorder, geopolitical turmoil and resource wars.
In these circumstances, should not elected politicians everywhere have an obligation to explain how their policies reflect the fact of global overshoot?
Denying reality is not a viable option; self-delusion can become all-destroying. If our leaders reject the foregoing framing, they should be required to show how the policies they are pursuing can deliver ecological stability, economic security, social equity and improved population health to future generations. Ordinary citizens should assert their right-to-know as if their lives depend upon it.
It is worth pointing out that B.C.’s recent provincial election campaign and Canada’s 2015 campaign ran with no reference to the key issues outlined here or any explanation of the omission (and the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was even more other-worldly).
Written by Charley Beresford, Executive Director and Keith Reynolds, Research Associate, both of the Columbia Institute.
The federal government’s new infrastructure bank has become increasingly controversial over the last few months. Studies have suggested the bank’s projects will be expensive and slow to advance. The high-priced developments will likely be out of range for all but the largest municipalities.
However, little attention has been paid so far to what is perhaps the biggest reason for controversy: The lack of public transparency about the public-private partnerships the bank will support.
In the 2015 federal election, the current governing party’s platform included a commitment to use the federal borrowing power to support municipalities in new projects such as providing water, sewer and transit. In March 2016, the new government convened the Advisory Council on Economic Growth to advise the finance minister.
The committee recommended that instead of using its own borrowing power, the federal government use private-sector money for these projects through public-private partnerships, where the private sector invests at least some of the money in return for healthy financial returns and a measure of control.
Since that time, conflict-of-interest questions have been raised about the makeup of the advisory council, which is largely comprising people involved with public-private partnerships.
There has been little opportunity for public debate on the new infrastructure bank. Its creation was buried in an omnibus budget bill. The legislation adds the infrastructure bank in a group of government bodies protected from access to information requests. Further, the finance minister has now said the federal cabinet will have the final say on the choice of projects.
In a recent report, the federal auditor general said that in two cases information needed for his work was denied. He continued, “Finance Canada confirmed the existence of the information we requested. However, as the department considered this information to be confidential to cabinet, it determined that it could not provide the information to our auditors.”
If the federal government and the Ministry of Finance already refuse to provide information to their own auditor, what hope do Canadians have to obtain information about decisions around public-private partnerships?
Access to information laws already provide secrecy to public-private partnerships thanks to “commercial confidentiality” protections. To this the federal government has now added “cabinet confidentiality” and legislation specifically to undermine access to information provisions. The workings of the infrastructure bank and the cabinet decisions that guide it will all operate in the shadows.
For Canadians, this isn’t good enough. The issue of secrecy must be addressed. Examples from other jurisdictions show that this is possible.
One province took steps to limit P3 secrecy. The former Manitoba government in 2012 passed its Public-Private Partnership Transparency and Accountability Act. While the legislation could have gone further, it demanded a preliminary analysis outlining the risks, costs and benefits of using a P3. Public consultation was required and the involvement of the provincial auditor was mandated. Unfortunately, as one of its first measures, the new Manitoba government moved to repeal the legislation.
In Britain, some companies providing public services are at least partly subject to freedom of information legislation.
The recent review of B.C.’s legislation recommended that the government “consider designating all publicly funded, health-care organizations as public bodies under FIPPA (Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act).” This model should be applied to private corporations delivering public infrastructure services in the federal government plans.
Public services need public scrutiny to protect public interest. This is even more true when these services are delivered by corporations whose primary interests are profits and their shareholders, not citizens.
If the federal government proceeds with its plan for a massive increase in P3s to deliver public services through the infrastructure bank, then the public must demand tough legislation for a new level of transparency around P3s.