According to delegates at the third annual Montreal Climate Summit, gatherings like these are good for building morale, mobilizing people and making new commitments.
“It’s a good sharing of best practices where people can take something that’s happening here and apply it there,” explains Alan DeSousa, opposition city councillor and borough mayor for Saint-Laurent.
Some of those ideas include a plan by eight Montreal universities to figure out how to measure scope three emissions and to come up with ways for each campus to adapt to climate change.
“A university campus is like a small neighbourhood,” says Cédrick Pautel, secretary general for École de technologie supérieure. “We have parks, we have buildings we have to take care of. Many of our buildings were built in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.”
He says researchers will share what they learn with the public.
Another plan, this one by the City of Montreal, is to redirect city pension fund investments towards greener ventures.
According to Marie-Andrée Mauger, City of Montreal executive committee member for ecological transition and the environment, “we will remove, within the next four years, all the fossil fuel investments in all the retirement funds of the City of Montreal.”
She adds that those investments are valued at $10 billion.
Despite these commitments, DeSousa points out that cities like Montreal face several challenges in implementing policies to address the climate emergency.
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“We’ve had plans, and the plans are well designed, the targets are ambitious, but the money isn’t always available,” he told Global News.
One thing that continues to be top of mind – funding of public transit. Monday, mayors met with Quebec’s transport minister Geneviève Guilbault to discuss just that. It’s an issue that’s pitted the province against municipalities for months.
Though Guilbault offered no new public transit funding for now Montreal mayor Valérie Plante says the meeting went well.
“I was really happy to hear the minister saying that she wants to solve, to come up with a solution, before the summer, she points out.
For some delegates at the meeting, the fuss over public transit funding is one example of how different entities seem to be pulling in different directions, stalling projects.
“Everyone wants to go further, faster,” DeSousa observes, “but not everyone knows what’s the best way to get there.”
He insists moving past that takes political will and leadership. Getting organizations to pull in the same direction is a challenge people attending the summit hope they’ll be one step closer to solving.