A second Montreal Climate Summit attracted some 650 participants, Tuesday and Wednesday, united around an ambitious goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the Montreal agglomeration by 55% by 2030 (compared to 1990 level) and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
The summit resulted in a flurry of announcements and commitments. The Mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, has unveiled a project to develop a quadrilateral in Old Montreal, which remains to be identified, into a pedestrian zone starting next summer. This “kingdom of pedestrians” is inspired by international examples such as Vienna, Brussels and Montpellier. The Plante administration will fulfill an election promise by transforming a section of boulevard Henri-Bourassa into a “sustainable mobility corridor” with a rapid bus service (SRB) and an express bicycle network (REV). It was also a question of transforming the transport of goods into a zero-emission activity, by widening the scope of the Colibri project (mini-district distribution centers to decarbonize the delivery of parcels).
The federal government was not left out. The Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, announced an envelope of approximately $230 million for various projects such as the reduction of GHG emissions, the replacement of oil heating systems for households with low revenues and the planting of 275,000 trees in Montreal and Vaudreuil-Dorion. In this regard, there is more realism in The man who planted trees than in the federal plan. Ottawa caresses the unrealistic goal — given the efficiency of the federal machine — of planting two billion trees by 2030, a plan harshly criticized by the federal commissioner for the environment and sustainable development. We are talking here about a government that arrives at the 2e rank among the G20 countries for subsidies to fossil fuel producers (the Liberals promise to end them by the end of the year).
This summit concentrates both good intentions and a bigger problem that the co-president of Montreal Climate Partnership, at the origin of the event, Karel Mayrand, summarized well in a text published in The Press. Most municipal and government adaptation plans boil down to “producing studies, planting trees and upgrading some infrastructure without a real overall plan,” he writes. The result is a “quilt of measures” with no real impact on our collective resilience in the face of climate change.
Did the Montreal Climate Summit produce anything other than a new quilt? Yes and no. On the one hand, this long list of announcements gives the impression that our elected officials are in a desperate search for achievements in the fight against climate change. On the other hand, there is also something encouraging in pooling the expertise of the public and private sectors in achieving a carbon neutrality objective. Let’s not neglect the potential ripple effect revealed by this combination of knowledge and the will to act, without however succumbing to delirious optimism.
Will this initiative, marked by the search for “concrete, realistic and rapid courses of action”, be sufficient? If the past is a guarantor of the future, the prognosis is rather grim. In the fight against climate change, the federal commissioner for the environment and sustainable development refers to “a series of failures over the past 30 years in Ottawa”. In Quebec, the time will run out to achieve the 2030 carbon neutrality objective. In Montreal, even a mayor as involved in the fight against climate change as Valérie Plante cannot do it. Montreal is moving away from its 55% GHG reduction target by 2030.
According to a study obtained by The Press, the 15 cities of the agglomeration generated 12.1 million tonnes of GHGs in 2019, or 3% more than the previous year. In Montreal, transportation is responsible for nearly 40% of greenhouse gas emissions, and these are not decreasing, on the contrary. GHG emissions from transport increased by 18% between 1990 and 2019. With the pandemic hiatus behind us, the balance will start to rise again. The problem is similar throughout Quebec, a nation whose roads are being colonized by pickup all powerful.
We come back to the origins of the problem: a car fleet that is growing faster than the population, a stagnation in the modal share of public transport in Montreal (and a decline throughout Quebec), land use planning policies that are unequal and downright irresponsible in some municipalities, the collective recklessness that leads us to claim the highway before the tramway, etc.
For now, we add handfuls of salt to a glass of water with the hope that an ocean will spring up. We are driving towards failure. Let’s face this reality, it’s the first step before demanding that our elected representatives take firmer and more concerted action in the fight against climate change.