Environmental activist Lynda Lukasik to lead Hamilton's new climate office

The City of Hamilton has hired longtime environmental advocate Lynda Lukasik to lead its new climate change office.

Lukasik, the former executive director of Environment Hamilton, will start the job Dec. 12. She will guide the implementation of the city's recently passed climate adaptation and mitigation plans, which include a roadmap to drastically slash carbon emissions by 2050 in effort to get to net-zero. 

"This is a really great opportunity because it feels like, with the plan in place, we're really moving in the right direction in the municipality," Lukasik told CBC Hamilton on Thursday, shortly after the city's manager of planning and economic development, Jason Thorne, announced her appointment in a social media post. "The establishment of this office really sends a strong signal that the city is committed."

Lukasik, who holds a master's degree in environmental studies and a PhD in urban planning, helped found Environment Hamilton. The advocacy group has been pushing the city to improve its reaction to climate change and other environmental hazards for more than two decades. 

Recently, Lukasik has been a leading voice in the fight to try to freeze Hamilton's urban boundary, a move that would preserve green space and farmland on the city's edge. (After success at council, which voted to freeze the boundary last year, the decision was recently overridden by the province in favour of residential development.)

Lukasik also ran in this fall's municipal election, losing the Ward 5 council race to Matt Francis. 

After years of pushing the bureaucracy from outside, now Lukasik will be part of it.

"I'm not going to lie. I think... there will be challenging aspects of the shift. I am used to being an activist," she said. 

"I have also spent a lot of my time on the outside having to learn to work with a whole diversity of people. Learning things like: how do you reach out to people? How do you help them understand what you are trying to achieve? What kind of compromises do you have to come to to push things forward?"

Lukasik says she is up for the challenge and opportunity and is excited to see what can be achieved.

Among her first tasks will be laying out the office's priorities of the numerous proposals and initiatives named in the city's climate plans.

Lukasik will also be instrumental in helping set up a new advisory committee of council, which will help guide future decisions, said Thorne on Friday in an interview with CBC Hamilton.

"We're doing public consultation on that right now and will bring terms of reference to council," said Thorne. "We also need to refine and finalize what our annual reporting… is going to look like for the strategy overall."

Thorne said the director of climate change initiatives role was an advertised position that received "a lot of interest" and applications. Council approved $215,000 for the new director's remuneration (salary and non-salary costs) in August.