A group of municipal councillors and mayors with a declared interest in climate resilience and the energy transition is taking its case to the federal government, after a series of meetings on Parliament Hill last month intended to connect local government with national climate policy.

Established in 2019, with visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic as a voice for local resilience and self-sufficiency, Climate Caucus positions local communities as the place where inaction on climate change shows up first. Now, the organization is looking to bring local councillors into the conversation about new investment in nation-building projects.

“We’re at the beginning of this process,” Executive Director Zoe Grams told The Energy Mix, but “this is now one of our primary priorities.” After stepping up as anchor partner for the #ElbowsUp for Climate campaign and seeing it generate more than three dozen contacts with federal Members of Parliament, “we’re excited to have more conversations about what local solutions look like. And one of the roles we play is underscoring the importance of local elected voices in these conversations, and helping to bridge the connection between what local elected leaders are saying on the ground and what a national response looks like.”

The challenge is that much bigger in the “complex” geopolitical moment Canada is facing, she added.

“We’re living in extremely difficult and unpredictable times. There’s this focus these huge, global pieces. But the opportunity is to look at what happens if we focus locally, at what happens if we build sustainable solutions across the country and start to create more national resilience and prosperity.”

In contrast to top-down planning, “it’s changing the model to bolster our municipalities and local policies and start building quite ambitious local solutions.”

Grams highlighted the high stakes facing cities in remarks to a reception at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre that drew several parliamentarians, including Environment and Climate Minister Julie Dabrusin.

“We all have stories of loved ones, neighbours, colleagues still recovering from flooding, wildfire, or landslides,” she said. “I hear weekly from mayors concerned about the growing disinformation in their communities and the increasing polarization, racism, and misogyny they face as a result.”

But municipalities are also the “most trusted form of government we have in Canada,” while holding responsibility for nearly half of the country’s emissions and two-thirds of the infrastructure, she said. And “we get to hear stories on a daily basis not just of hope, but of actions that stoke such hope. Of the community that has transformed their energy security through local, renewable power sources. Of the municipality marrying affordable housing with safe, climate-ready housing.”

Normalizing Climate Policy

In its three-year strategic plan, Climate Caucus lists seven priorities that include stepped-up advocacy, climate resilience and just transitions, support for Indigenous collaboration and reconciliation, bringing more voices to the table, and normalizing progress on climate policy.

“For me, the big vision is that climate policy is normalized as a pragmatic, absolutely essential solution to almost all the systemic problems we face in this country and as communities,” Grams said. “That local elected leaders across the country feel deeply empowered to support their communities through climate policy. That we’re also seeing that at the federal level, and that the voices around those council tables are representative of their populations.”

The organization takes a “big tent approach” to inviting elected officials in, Grams added.

“However you define your commitment to climate policy, if there’s one thing you want to get over the line in council or if climate is your career and what you’re running on, there’s room for everybody to receive support and be part of our community,” she told The Mix. “Regardless of your political ideology, this is a space and a community and a network where you can meet like-minded folks, or not like-minded folks, and solve important things together.”

That crossover “is one of the things I’m most proud of as staff,” she said. “It’s a foundational part of who we are and how we work. It’s one of the reasons we can get things done, and one of the reasons we hope we’ll be able to get more done in Ottawa.”

There’s ever-wider recognition that the need for practical climate solutions crosses political lines, said Climate Caucus board member Will Cole-Hamilton, a city councillor from Courtenay, B.C.

“We can all see things are getting worse,” he said. “We want to protect the people in our communities. We all agree that it’s necessary. You can’t argue that the flood isn’t happening or the fire isn’t real.” So Climate Caucus members “start out with the conversations about adaptation and resilience, and once you start finding common ground, more common ground seems to appear.”

‘Moving Good Ideas Around’

Climate Caucus also hopes national and provincial Zoom calls that offer elected councillors “a community of people who empathize and want to help,” and who “wouldn’t naturally geographically be there sometimes,” Cole-Hamilton added. “Chances are that if you have a problem, we’re all going to do roughly the same things with different resources, climates, and populations. But if you’ve got something that you’re trying to work on, chance are that someone, somewhere has come up with a solution.”

So “we help move good ideas around, rather than having to figure it all out on our own.”

Once those conversations start, “you just get into multisolving,” he said. “We don’t have time to solve one problem at a time, but all of these things dovetail. We’re practical people. We have to control deficits. We have to find something real on the ground to solve on-the-ground problems.”

But for an elected official who might be the only member of their council to see climate impacts or solutions and a priorities, it also helps “to have colleagues around who will have your back,” even if they’re “perhaps outliers in their own communities.”