The time is no longer for half-measures in the face of the climate emergency, and the metropolis must accelerate the pace of its actions to achieve greater resilience without seeking social acceptability at all costs, believes the regional director of public health from Montreal, Mylène Drouin, a few days before the Montreal 2024 Climate Summit.
Co-president of the third edition of the Summit, which will be held Tuesday and Wednesday at the Grand Quai of the Old Port of Montreal, Mylène Drouin believes that the Montreal community must step on the accelerator. Reduce GHGs, green the city, promote active transportation, counter climate change and protect the most vulnerable; The list of challenges for Montreal is long, and time is starting to run out.
“I think we are at a time when there are no half measures. In this context, less popular decisions may be taken. But I think we don’t have time to wait until we have 100% social acceptability,” says M.me Drouin.
In the 2010s, Montreal boroughs, including Le Plateau-Mont-Royal and Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, undertook to implement traffic calming measures to discourage through traffic and counter “all-in” traffic. -the car”, fueling many outcries. Nearly 15 years later, the removal of parking spaces continues to cause discontent, but measures favorable to active mobility have spread throughout the city. “Sometimes, changes have to be brought about in these transitions,” believes Mylène Drouin. “It always takes precursors. There are neighborhoods that are paving the way. Now, we must move more quickly from experimentation to the implementation of these practices and generalize them. »
What is a summit for?
Organized by the Montreal Climate Partnership at the initiative of the Foundation of Greater Montreal and the Trottier Family Foundation, the Montreal Climate Summit is intended to be a place for meetings and discussions on the means to accelerate climate action. It will bring together some 900 participants from the business community, environmental groups, unions, the community sector and decision-makers, including the mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, the federal minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, and the Quebec Minister of the Environment, Benoit Charette.
The event will also be an opportunity to review the commitments made at previous summits. During the first Summit, held in 2022, the City of Montreal announced its intention to no longer authorize fossil fuel heating systems for new buildings starting in 2024. It also moved forward by a decade, to 2040, its objective of seeing the entire real estate stock of the metropolis powered by renewable energies.
There may be less popular decisions made. But I think we don’t have time to wait until we have 100% social acceptability.
And during last year’s Summit, transportation, which represented 42.7% of greenhouse gas emissions in Quebec in 2022, was at the center of discussions. Mayor Plante notably announced last year that a quadrilateral in Old Montreal would become the “kingdom of pedestrians” from the summer of 2024.
Beyond good intentions, have these summits produced concrete results? Christian Savard, general director of Vivre en ville and member of the Summit organizing committee, believes so. He cites the issue of decarbonization of buildings, which has been the subject of commitments from both the City of Montreal and several large owners, such as Ivanhoé Cambridge in 2022.
Since then, last December, Montreal adopted its regulation to prohibit the installation of GHG-emitting equipment in new constructions (applicable for small buildings from 1er October 2024 and for adults on 1er April 2025). On April 25, it was the turn of the Metropolitan Community of Montreal (CMM) to follow suit with a similar metropolitan regulation for the 79 municipalities in the Montreal region that did not already have such rules.
Christian Savard believes that the commitments made publicly by the private sector have created a snowball effect and encouraged cities to move forward with their regulations. ” The fact of [s’engager] publicly forces people not to drag their feet and to respect their commitments. For the CMM, it was even faster than we thought. » The next challenge, he recalls, however, will be to decarbonize existing buildings, which may be more difficult.
Private sector efforts
The involvement of the private sector in the fight against climate change is essential, says Anne-Marie Hubert, managing partner for Eastern Canada at EY and co-chair of the event. But according to her, several obstacles remain across Canada due in particular to the tangle of different levels of government. “We lack ambition and we lack coordination and collaboration to achieve the objectives,” she said. We have had enough of federal-provincial bickering. […] We should all have common goals. We will need money from the federal, provincial and private sectors. It is not true that there is enough money coming from taxes. »
According to her, a summit such as the one that begins Tuesday allows participants to share experiences and highlight adaptation strategies that work. “We can no longer ignore climate change,” she emphasizes. We won’t change the world at the Summit, but the people there will agree on actions they can take. »