For 2 years, climate resources shifted in COVID-19. Now, cities like Hamilton look to get on track

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Staff at Environment Hamilton (EH) couldn't help but feel despondent while watching a recent city council debate about adding more lanes to a major expressway in the southern Ontario city.

"Can you imagine if our council talked about the climate crisis with the same level of gusto?" asked Lynda Lukasik, executive director of EH, one of city's loudest voices on climate action.

For the organization's climate campaign co-ordinator, Ian Borsuk, the discussion over roadway expansion was telling.

"We have staff time to work on [a] Commonwealth Games bid, we can talk about expanding highways…. It's been very interesting to see, over the course of the pandemic, where there still are resources and staff time available that wasn't available to climate action."

Friday marks the third Earth Day since the start of the pandemic. The health crisis prompted a massive shift of resources and energy at all levels of government.

In Hamilton, groups like EH and Hamilton 350 say that over the past two years, the city has fallen behind on its plans to combat climate change — and it's time to get on track.  

The city's detailed plan to achieve net-zero emissions, an urban forest strategy and regular climate-change updates to council have taken a back seat to COVID-19, the organizations say.

They note the city's three staffers on the climate file were redeployed for several months, while some other municipalities, such as nearby Halton Hills in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), strengthened their climate-change departments in tandem with their pandemic response.

"During the pandemic, we… have been saying to the [City of Hamilton's] manager and staff, 'You need to pandemic proof your climate action,'" said Lukasik. "I think we all collectively understand that we need to be responding to the pandemic, but that doesn't mean the tsunami waiting in the wings can be ignored in the interim."

Not long before the pandemic hit, Hamilton declared a climate emergency, vowing to treat climate change as an existential crisis. 

It was one of hundreds of Canadian municipalities to do so. According to Random Acts of Green, a Peterborough, Ont.-based organization tracking those sign-ons, 642 have made a declaration, including hundreds of municipal councils in Quebec starting in 2018, then Vancouver in January 2019 and Hamilton two months later. The Assembly of First Nations (AFN), which represents 634 communities, declared a First Nations Climate Emergency in July 2019.  

In Hamilton, the declaration directed staff to start work on a plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, in line with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommendations on how to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

It also prompted staff to form a multi-department task force, which has been working to "support a culture shift ensuring that climate change is understood as a collective corporate responsibility and that a climate change lens is incorporated into routine work across all city departments," according to the city's website. Activists say this is not yet happening, a claim the city did not deny.