Comments on: Earthgauge Radio September 27, 2012: Disappearing Arctic sea ice and Ottawa’s Environment Committee Chair Maria McRae

By: City of Otawa is CORRUPT

City of Otawa is CORRUPT — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 12:08:28 +0000

Maria McRae is not letting anything get to council at the City of Ottawa regarding the environment. She has muzzled a whole department, for her own personal vendetta against them. She could actually care less about the environment, and would rather see huge tracts of land bulldozed to build megastores.

The fact that she chairs the Environment Committee is an absolute farce. Her goal is to not have any bad news aired so that she can get re-elected, or use her position as a stepping stone to move to provincial or federal politics.

She is actually stopping work from going ahead for the environment.

She fires or finds a way to remove whoever doesn’t agree with her.

Maria McRae is not there for the people. Scientists are the material experts, not some over-eating, doughnut-chomping liar.

By: Mark Brooks

Mark Brooks — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 04:01:10 +0000

Thanks very much Charles for your comments. Very insightful and well considered. I actually interviewed her some time ago and wish I had been more informed of the city’s climate change record at the time. I suspected there may be those who took issue with what Councilor McRae said. I’m glad you weighed in on this as someone who is following this issue closely. We’re grateful for your efforts in keeping the councilors’ feet to the fire.

By: Charles Hodgson

Charles Hodgson — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:27:26 +0000

Mark, thank you for your interview with Councillor Maria McRae, Chair of the City of Ottawa’s Environment Committee. The City is working on a number of issues and is in some cases making considerable progress.

However, I respectfully beg to differ with Councillor McRae’s assessment that “we’re doing very very well” on climate change.

City Council in 2005 set a greenhouse gas reduction target of 20% by 2012, applicable to all residents and businesses in the city. A separate target of 30% reduction was set in 2009 specifically for City of Ottawa operations which themselves make up about 5% of our overall total emissions. Both these targets were to be based on 1990 emission levels. The GHG report Councillor McRae refers to shows no reductions at all compared to the overall 20% target set for this year. In fact the GHG report shows a 0.9% increase between 2004 and 2008.

To most Ottawans completely failing to meet a target cannot be called “doing very very well.”

You asked Councillor McRae whether the city has a climate change plan but didn’t get an answer.

In 2005 City Council adopted an Air Quality and Climate Change Management Plan whose planning horizon extended to 2012. There has been no indication from the current Council that climate change planning will be revisited.

The reason for this is perhaps revealed in the answer she gave to your question on the municipal role in climate change.

She said she thought people were confused and “the most effective place to change high level policy, what their mandate is, is the federal government, and we look to them to put those policies in place.”

Perhaps it’s the City of Ottawa’s Official Plan that is confusing people when it says
“Climate change is one of the critical environmental challenges facing the world and measures to both reduce GHG emissions (mitigation) and prepare for the impacts of climate change (adaptation) need to be incorporated into all levels of City decision‐making”

and that
“The City has made a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in both corporate operations and at the community level.”

To most Ottawans avoiding the issue cannot be called “doing very very well.”