In this city, climate action isn’t partisan

Elected leaders heeded voices of youth, write Christine Boyle, Rebecca Bligh, and Michael Wiebe.

Last January, when Vancouver became the first municipality in English-speaking Canada to declare a “climate emergency,” the council vote was unanimous. Three months later, when we approved six bold moves to ramp up our climate action in line with the emergency, it was again unanimous (with a single abstention). Since Vancouver’s January motion, over 50 municipalities in English-speaking Canada have passed climate emergency motions. In Quebec, where a vibrant climate movement has been leading on this issue, nearly 400 municipalities have passed such motions.

Vancouver’s climate emergency motions have not been merely symbolic. The city’s resulting climate emergency plan aligns our targets with those called for last October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top climate scientists. Our city now has a concrete plan to reduce the city’s GHG emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2030. We are implementing policies that will dramatically reduce the use of natural gas in our homes and buildings, and fundamentally shift how people and goods get around. The plan we have introduced has been widely recognized as among the most ambitious in North America.

This is no small feat. Vancouver’s current city council is a dynamic cross-partisan mix. Despite the longtime presence of political parties in the city, for the first time in decades, no party has a majority, and Mayor Kennedy Stewart was elected as the city’s second-ever independent mayor. And, in a historic first, eight of our council’s 11 members are women.

What has unfolded in Vancouver (and in many other municipalities) stands in marked contrast with how the climate debate has unfolded federally and in most provinces.

We were ready to take a bold stand, and to take some political risks.

Across the country, we have tragically seen the urgent need for climate action turned into a political wedge issue. Carbon pricing has been weaponized by parties on all sides, despite the fact that it is an incremental policy that only starts to get us where we need to go. In the face of rising global recognition that we face a climate emergency, so much of Canadian politics is still squabbling over marginal matters. At the federal level, and in far too many provinces, we haven’t yet seen our political leaders “unite behind the science,” as the young Swedish climate champion Greta Thunberg has urged.

So, how have bold climate plans in Vancouver passed unanimously? It certainly helped that our council is made up of people who accept the science of climate change. We were ready to take a bold stand, and to take some political risks.

What made the most significant difference is that across our political differences, we as elected leaders heeded the words of the young people in our city.

When the climate emergency motion came to council, hundreds of local student strikers — mostly high school students who are not yet permitted to vote — hand-wrote letters encouraging council to pass the motion. They rallied outside city hall.

Many of these teenagers signed up to speak before our council, and shared powerful and eloquent stories imploring us to ramp up our climate action. And then, when it was time for us to vote on our climate motions, these young people filled the gallery of our council chambers to bear witness as we debated and voted. It was a moving moment of intergenerational reckoning.

With a federal election looming, we need strong commitments on climate action — action that matches the scale and urgency of the climate emergency — to be prioritized above partisan feuds.

Young people across this country are facing real threats to their future. And they are making it clear to elected leaders that they expect us to respond.