AMO Updates
Summary of Discussions
AMO Updates from March 24th, 2022 Ontario Climate Caucus Meeting:
- The Province of Ontario released Bill 109 what they are calling the More Homes for Everyone Act that is being referred to the Standing Committee on the Legislative Assembly. AMO is in the process of reviewing the Bill.
- Strong focus on Housing continues. Climate Change paper on climate change adaptation and mitigation in municipal water and waste water systems forthcoming this spring.
- The reasons why councils are putting these goals forward are because that is the targets science says we have to achieve and residents are demanding action. There is the need to make progress towards net zero targets and there are significant local benefits to doing so. We always knew it would not be easy.
- Net-zero targets/2050 targets, and the ambition associated with them, have a strong impact when it comes from the municipalities in terms of the overall "what is the municipality committing itself to"? What will the municipality need to have in place in order to achieve that target? What is within the ability of municipalities to advance? What is outside their control, but essential to enabling their target to be a reality? For example, how does the electricity grid transform to allow you to get to those goals?
- AMO is also here to advocate to make those regulatory and policy changes work and fight for those targets. For example, municipalities do not control the electricity system and grid.
- A municipality acting alone cannot achieve net zero targets - this is a collective effort!
Embedded targets within departments - this sometimes makes the targets "invisible" to the community. Can you speak on this?
- There are tools available to help municipalities make the actions and progress towards targets more visible, for example: a dashboard; a central resource that residents can see. Embedding GHG targets into municipal departments is an implementation action (the community may not be as interested in the processes used but more interested in the actions and progress towards targets).
- The City of Kingston - established a policy that all replacement vehicles are EV - are now more vehicles at Utilities Kingston are EV.
- Do community energy plans come under climate action plans? Yes. They go by a variety of different names (i.c.e. CAP, CEP). There may be slight differences in scope, but if your municipality already has a Climate Action Plan another Energy Plan risks a lot of duplication. Better to put those resources into implementation and identify gaps that should be addressed in future updates to the Plan.
- Is AMO agnostic about how homes are heated? AMO talked about the electrification of cars - which will require a lot of electricity - but if we are successful with homes installing heat pumps, that will also take more electricity. Can you speak on this?
- AMO is agnostic in the way homes are heated. AMO supports municipal councils to achieve their priorities, and one of the main principles is local autonomy - and so AMO would never presume what works for one community works for another.
- For electrification - AMO will be doing a climate change paper to address this broader scope of how electrification will come into play, what planning needs to be done, how other municipalities will be doing to advance this effort.
March 11th, 2021 OCC Meeting
Amber Crawford and Craig Reid from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario joined the Ontario Climate Caucus to provide an update re AMO's climate policy and action priorities
- PDF of Presentation
- Recording of Presentation
Upcoming Papers and Next Steps
- Food Waste Reduction (est. May 2021)
- Municipal Energy Projects (est. August 2021)
- Water/Wastewater Energy Capture & Renewable Natural Gas
(est. October 2021)