Hamilton city council recently declared a climate emergency and pledged to substantially reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. While the declaration carries symbolic weight, the ambitious emission reduction targets can only be met if city council commits significant resources towards climate change measures. Climate activists and city councilors weigh in on what this will mean for the city.
On March 27, Hamilton city council finalized the decision to declare a climate emergency in the city of Hamilton.
The decision comes as a result of a report from the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change released in October 2018. The report found that, unless humanity limits global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, there will be a risk of long lasting and irreversible changes that will result in major loss of life.
The report found that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would mean reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 45 per cent of 2010 levels by 2030, and reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” stated the report.
Hamilton city council has joined a number other Canadian cities, including Kingston, Vancouver and Halifax, who have pledged to reduce emissions to meet these targets.
The declaration instructs the city manager to put together a multi departmental task force and present an emission reduction plan within 120 days.
According to the 2018 vital signs report released by the Hamilton community foundation, Hamilton has double the per capita GHG emissions compared to other greater Toronto and Hamilton area cities.
The 2015 community action plan set the goals of reducing GHG emissions by 20 per cent of 2006 levels by 2020, 50 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050. The new goals, however, are more ambitious.
By declaring a climate emergency, the city aims to communicate the degree of risk to the public and demonstrate that the city is taking the issues seriously. During the board of health meeting, environment Hamilton climate campaign coordinator Ian Borsuk noted that it is important to show the public that the city understands the severity of the issue.
Additionally, a major goal of the declaration is to coordinate municipal action to develop a centralized strategy for dealing with climate change. This will take the form of a multi departmental task force across city departments.
“This isn’t something that can be left as a side project, this isn’t something that can be left as another file, this is something that needs to be part of what the city does every single day,” stated Borsuk during the presentation.
At the March 18 board of health meeting, presenters from environment Hamilton made suggestions to the city about ways to reduce emission levels by the target dates, noting that the city has already taken significant measures to reduce GHG emissions, but can do more.
One suggestion was to expand and improve public transit. Currently, Hamilton street rail ridership falls short of projections by about 10 per cent. The city is currently working towards a 10 year plan to improve HSR service, which includes improving service and adding capacity.
After industry, transportation is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas in Hamilton. According to Hamilton 350 coordinator Don McLean, transportation is one of the areas that the city can make the biggest difference. By extending bus service and making transit more affordable, McLean sees potential for large increases in ridership.
McLean also notes that Hamilton charges some of the lowest parking fees in Canada. The city owns some parking facilities, and has the ability to tax parking lots separately in order to drive pricing. In order to incentivize people to take public transit, McLean says, the parking rate has to be considerably higher than bus fare.
“Why switch to a bus if I can park downtown all day for $4?" he asked.
Another suggestion that environment Hamilton made to the board of health was to develop a “green standard” for new public and private buildings. By mandating energy use limits, the city can make a substantial difference in emissions.
Environment Hamilton executive director Lynda Lukasik also noted during the presentation that enhancing green infrastructure would help the city meet its emission targets. This includes measures such as bio soils, better managed storm water, and planting an urban forest.
Urban canopy currently sits at about 18 per cent, which is 12 per cent below the official target. Expanding the urban forest would help draw down emissions, reduce stormwater flows, and mediate heat effects.
In order to meet these goals, multiple environmental organizations across Hamilton have suggested that the city commits to applying a climate lens to all of its decisions. Similarly to the equity, diversity and inclusion lens equity, diversity and inclusion lens announced in March, the climate lens would evaluate all city actions in terms of their climate impact.
One of the main challenges for meeting the emission reduction targets is resource availability. During the board of health meeting, ward 3 councilor Nrinder Nann pointed out that achieving the commitments would likely involve retrofitting almost every building across Hamilton and switching to electric or hydrogen fuel cells for vehicles. Implementing these measures would require substantial investments of time and money.
Currently, the community climate change action plan receives provincial funding from the proceeds of the cap and trade program. However, the province scrapped the cap and trade program in October 2018 and has pulled funding from other environmental initiatives. Therefore funding for the emissions reduction plan would likely have to come from other sources.
Ward 4 councilor Sam Merulla noted that the challenge will become clear once staff reports the budget to city council within 120 days. If people hear that their taxes will increase, they may be resistant to implementing the plan.
However, Nann pointed out that even though dealing with climate change requires immediate spending, it will generate revenue in the long term. Additionally, inaction will incur high remedial costs.
Another challenge for meeting the emission reduction targets is industry. Industry accounts for 83 per cent of Hamilton's emissions, a large percentage of which comes from steel mills. However, steel mills are under provincial and federal jurisdiction, meaning that the city does not have direct control over their emissions.
Despite this, notes McLean, the city can work towards offsetting emissions through agricultural practices and reforestation.
Even if the city manages to reach the emission reduction targets in time, McLean worries that it will be too little, too late.
Climate change is a cumulative problem, meaning that all GHGs currently in the atmosphere will continue to contribute to warming, even if emissions stop.
“The kinds of things that are being talked about now are the kinds of things that should have been very actively implemented 30 years ago,” he stated. “ If you've got a cumulative problem then setting any date in the future as to when we should stop is too late.”
In order to make the climate change emergency more than a symbolic gesture, the city will have to dedicate significant resources and implement regular checkpoints to reduce emissions. The true weight of this declaration will become clear once the task force presents the emission reduction plan to city council. To achieve net zero emissions by 2050, the city has to implement unprecedented changes across all aspects of decision-making.
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Not too long ago, McMaster made a new hire.
The university was in need of a new director of Parking and Security Services and looked to the community for an option. The person who was eventually hired was Glenn De Caire, the former Chief of Police for the Hamilton Police Service. Looking at title alone, De Caire sounds more than qualified to fill a security-related role at the university, but looking deeper into his background, one surprising detail sticks out.
Under De Caire’s leadership at the Hamilton Police Service, the organization began, and actively chose to continue, the controversial practice of carding. For those unfamiliar, carding is, in general, the checking of someone’s identity card to confirm an identity, age or address. But in the context of Hamilton Police, and many other police services alike, carding refers to the practice of arbitrarily checking the personal identification details of random citizens, often used as a tool of racial profiling, predominantly seen among black men. Carding is currently being challenged as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and was declared to be “wrong and illegal” by the Ontario ombudsman in a 2015 report.
According to a CBC Hamilton article, De Caire pushed Hamilton Police to continue carding as he claimed Hamilton would be “less safe, and crimes [would] go unsolved” if carding were abolished as a practice. In other words, he felt that profiling black men would help stop crime, as he perceived them to be the primary culprits.
When someone with a background like this is hired at a university with a diverse student body, I can’t help but wonder, how?
De Caire’s hiring involved a board of current university staff from different departments. It even included a representative from the MSU, our current student body president, Ehima Osazuwa.
At what point did this detail about De Caire’s career come up? Did it ever come up? How are the hiring practices at McMaster created without factoring in potential human rights violations at previous places of employment?
McMaster does a perfectly adequate job at hiring competent people. Our university runs smoothly for a reason, and that is in part due to the strong hires running across the faculty and staff. But a stain like this on an otherwise mostly clean record of hires makes it even more alarming.
This year’s Diversity Week emphasized the theme of “Constructing Our Stories.” Its goal was to help the McMaster community better understand the importance of being able to share your narrative and have people accept your story as an intersectional truth. A hire like this runs contrary to the messages of inclusivity and diversity that McMaster pushes. How will racialized students who have been profiled be able to openly tell their story knowing that the security enforcement will not believe them?
During these last few weeks, students and staff have seen firsthand how critical it is to have a space where we all feel safe and can tell our stories without being silenced. A hire like this is a step backward on a campus that is trying to move forward.
Photo Credit: Barry Gray/Hamilton Spectator
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Natalie Doland
The Silhouette
The parking cost at McMaster from September 2013-April 2014 is about $556, and the average Canadian university tuition is $5,772. This makes parking at McMaster for eight months approximately one-tenth of the average Canadian tuition.
There have been numerous cases of illegal parking this academic year. Approximately 75 tickets have been issued, and there is an indeterminate amount of parking-mischief that has gone unnoticed. There are many reasons that people feel this is their only option. Parking on campus is overly expensive, and students have limited resources to pay for fees on top of tuition. It is hard enough for students to own a car and pay for gas, let alone buy or pay for a parking permit.
A fine of $75 is administered to anyone caught scamming free parking. Even if five tickets are received over the eight month academic period, it is still cheaper than buying the most inexpensive parking pass at McMaster. It is not surprising that students are continually finding ways to cheat the system. The odds of getting caught are in the parker’s favour because it would require a great amount of staff to catch cialis for women every illegal parker. A McMaster graduate stated that her tactic worked 40 or 50 times and she paid minimally. Honest people that pay for parking are beginning to see that these illegal strategies are working. Consequently, more and more people are trying to cheat the system. As more students hear about the different tactics avoiding the system, the problem will only worsen and fewer students will pay for parking. McMaster must take action.
McMaster may argue they need to charge this amount for maintenance, new sidewalks or other miscellaneous costs. McMaster can work out this problem is through student fees. Bus passes are automatically added to a student’s fees regardless of if the student wants to use the pass. McMaster should consider the decision of designing a system where a student can opt-out of the bus pass and use that cost towards a parking permit. This would reduce the cost for students parking on campus, subsequently reducing the amount of illegal parking. McMaster’s solution to solving the illegal parking issue is imminent. The ball is in their court and it is time that they take action on this issue.
Universities are hubs for innovation and creativity. And sometimes, this creativity can be used to cheat the system and park for free.
Since the start of 2013, McMaster Parking and Security Services have issued 75 tickets to people who were caught trying to circumvent the parking system.
There are an indeterminate number of students, faculty and visitors whose parking-related mischief goes completely unnoticed and unpunished. And there are plenty of methods being used to beat the system.
Sarah, a McMaster grad, said that she parked illegally all the time.
“My best tactic has been to use a previously issued ticket and put it on my windshield pretending that I had already been ticketed [that day]. Works like a charm,” she said.
A Fleming College student named Dan had a similar tactic. When visiting McMaster to see his girlfriend on weekends, he would park around the west quad, in Lot M, or the one behind Bates Hall.
“Over there, they give you a warning slip before they issue a ticket,” he explained. “I just keep the warning in my glove box, put it in under my windshield wipers when I park, and they just assume someone already gave me a warning.”
Other approaches can be less simple. Justine, a Mac grad, said that she used to use a frying pan to get out of paying for parking.
Her story references the smaller parking lot in front of Ivor Wynne. In that lot, a driver pulls up to the automatic arm and ticket dispenser. A metal detector identifies the car and issues a barcode that says what time the driver arrived at the lot. Upon leaving, the driver is supposed to insert this barcode, and be charged according to how long he or she has been parked there. The driver can then pay using debit or credit.
A stay of less than 15 minutes is free of charge.
Justine invented a scheme one day, when for a reason that is forgotten, she had a frying pan in her car. She thought “If it’s a metal detector, I bet it will pick up this frying pan”.
And so it began. When leaving the parking lot, instead of using the voucher she got when she parked, Justine would go back to the entrance, wave the frying pan in front of the metal detector, and receive a new voucher with that time encoded on it. While exiting, she would simply insert that new voucher into the machine, and being less than fifteen minutes since waving her frying pan, she could leave the lot for free.
“I probably did it 40 or 50 times,” she said. “I didn’t have to pay very often.”
The plot thickened if someone started looking at her waving a frying pan in a parking lot. Of course, she would wait for quiet moments to run over to the metal detector, but if someone did notice her, Justine would call them over, and offer up her secret method in exchange for their silence.
Those without the fortitude to amass a scheme can get away with free parking too. Will Farr, a Kinesiology student at McMaster, told a story of a very simple way to escape parking charges.
“I was walking from Les Prince when I looked over to the parking lot in front of Hedden. I saw a guy in a big, black SUV drive over the curb and turn around the barrier, so he didn’t have to pay for parking.”
Terry Sullivan is the director of Security and Parking Services. He said that his department is doing important work to stop this issue.
“Not paying for parking is theft and we treat is seriously.”
“Parking revenue contributes to the betterment of the University through reconstruction of sidewalks, roadways and bike pads,” said Sullivan.
Anyone caught attempting to scam free parking receives a $75 fine and a suspension of their parking privileges for a month.
Parking lots are regularly monitored by staff and closed-circuit video cameras.
Photo credit: Julia Redmond / News Editor
For many McMaster students, the bridge spanning Cootes Drive is a road seldom travelled. The far west side of campus is currently home to just the Campus Services Building, a few baseball diamonds, and several parking lots. But a group of McMaster professors plans to change that.
Coming from departments ranging from Environmental Science to English, they call their budding project the “MACMarsh.” In 2009, the City of Hamilton tore up part of west campus’ Parking Lot M to install a Combined Sewage Overflow tank, and it has yet to be repaved. The MACMarsh group is encouraging the university to remove the asphalt that remains and let nature reclaim the barren ground. The parking-lot-to-paradise transition would both increase the amount of campus green space and create a valuable teaching and research facility.
Lot M was first created in the early 1970s, when McMaster was facing an impending parking crisis. Projections at the time indicated that the number of motorists would increase dramatically. Fortunately, Mac had purchased 160 acres of wetlands from the Royal Botanical Gardens in 1963, including the Coldspring Valley Nature Sanctuary. Anticipating a need for much more parking, McMaster cleared the Coldspring Area, rerouted a nearby creek, and built several new parking lots.
Yet the anticipated parking demand never materialized, and a 2011 study found that now just 2,803 of McMaster’s 3,963 parking spaces are needed, even at peak demand.
“Because of increases in bike use and people walking and public transit, there’s been a big decrease in the number of cars on campus,” said Mike Waddington, a professor in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences. Waddington is the Associate Director of the McMaster Centre for Climate Change and one of the professors leading the development of MACMarsh.
“We view it as not so much replacing a parking lot as creating education and research opportunities, as well as being a prettier entrance to the university.”
A greener welcome to Mac is not just a tangential benefit of MACMarsh. It would also help to fulfill McMaster’s long-held goal of minimizing impact on Cootes Paradise, environmentally and aesthetically.
This vision of MACMarsh as a peaceful, pretty place in addition to a research and teaching facility has attracted people from a wide range of faculties. Daniel Coleman, a professor of Canadian literature in the English department, says the project can be an asset to the Humanities as well. One of his projects involves writing extensively about one small part of Cootes Paradise. “I wanted to see how much I could learn from one area,” he said. Coleman also believes that Humanities involvement can benefit the project.
“Human experience and human story and human emotional connection is, in my view, essential to any kind of ecological success… I think humanists have a lot to contribute to projects like this.”
Students, too, have a role to play in the project; in fact, Waddington says that MACMarsh is being developed primarily for them.
“Any time we can get students… out of the classroom, into the field, it’s a good thing. So I view this as student-driven,” he said. “Plus, reclamation research has become very important… Canada is very resource driven. A lot of our students are getting jobs in resource management. So these students, fifteen, twenty years from now will be able to come back and see this facility which they’ve helped develop and see it as it restores back to a natural ecosystem.”
Already, several undergraduate students are involved: Hillary MacDougall, a fourth-year Geography and Earth Sciences student, spent part of her summer working at Lot M.
“You learn about digging wells and stream monitoring, but when you’re actually doing it, it makes so much more sense… I think [MACMarsh] would be a really good opportunity for students to take learning from the classroom and apply it to the outdoors and ‘real-life’ things,” she said.
Waddington added that these kinds of opportunities would extend beyond the Faculty of Science, and that as many as a dozen courses that could make use of the facility have been identified.
At this point, MACMarsh is very much in its infancy, and on-site development is at least two or three years away. The project received a Forward With Integrity grant last May to fund the installation of wells and meters that measure aspects of the area such as water flow. Waddington is optimistic that the project will attract philanthropists in the future. He points to a similar venture undertaken by the University of Ohio that has proved very popular with donors.
“[McMaster] would be the first [university] in Canada, and only second in the world, to have a research wetland on its campus,” he said when asked about the financial needs of the project.
As for the Marsh’s effects on its residential neighbours, that’s a facet of the project that has to be examined carefully.
“Before anything would begin it would be very important, obviously, to go through formal designs and discuss it with the public,” Waddington commented. He further indicated, though, that he believes most people would rather live next to a naturalized wetland than a parking lot. “It would be interesting to track public perception throughout time,” he said.
McMaster was planning to repave the disturbed part of Lot M and reopen it for parking, but those involved with MACMarsh are optimistic that this intention will be reversed in light of their project. In a few years, current first year students might be enjoying their lunch beside a pristine, on-campus research marsh. As it develops, everyone will have a part to play: from Earth Scientists and English professors to students and community members. Coleman sees this interdisciplinary, intercommunity cooperation as a chance to learn and grow.
“It’s a “way of linking up, let’s say, ‘disparate’ forms of knowledge and saying ‘hey these are all part of our shared story about this place’.”
If you looked at early photos of the McMaster campus, you might notice that it looks drastically different than it does today. In the 82 years Mac has spent in this city, the school has grown, more buildings were put up to accommodate the growing population, and the campus expanded to take up more of the surrounding area.
But in early November, the administration took a major step towards bringing Mac back to its roots. The President’s Advisory Committee on Cootes Paradise (PACCP) announced on Nov. 9 that a 30-metre buffer zone would be created between parking lot M, on west campus, and the nearby Ancaster Creek.
The implementation of the buffer will mean the lot will lose 318 parking spots, according to the Hamilton Conservation Authority.
The lot currently has 1,400 transponders for staff and students, and approximately 1,300 spots. According to Gord Arbeau, McMaster’s Director of Public and Community Relations, the use of the lot is spread out over the week, so the loss of the additional space is not expected to have an effect on the availability of parking.
The area that is now occupied by parking lots M, N, O and P was the floodplain area for Ancaster Creek. It wasn’t until McMaster took possession of this portion of the Royal Botanical Gardens land in the 1960s that the floodplain was paved.
Randy Kay, a local environmental activist, said this change has been a long time coming.
“This is a very integral part of the puzzle,” he explained. “It is a huge, important piece of the larger Cootes Paradise recovery.”
Kay is the organizer of Restore Cootes, an environmental group dedicated to the revitalization of the area surrounding McMaster. The group has been leading “Ponds to Parking” hikes since December 2011 to spread awareness of the issue.
Kay also submitted a letter to the University Planning Committee in March 2011 encouraging the administration to take on the wetland restoration project, but did not have any success at the time.
“I was a little upset, actually… when you send a letter to the University Planning Committee, they don’t actually even acknowledge they’ve received it.”
In the spring of 2012, after a meeting with McMaster officials, two city councilors, and the chair of the PACCP, the University agreed to take on the project, creating a specific lot M subcommittee, and their support “changed the dynamic quite a bit,” said Kay.
Although the agreement to the 30 m buffer marks an achievement for Restore Cootes, Kay explained that the process of working through the channels of University administration was not always easy.
“You’re kind of left in this one-way vacuum where you don’t get anything back. It goes into this black hole of administration,” he said of his early attempts to get the attention of the University Planning Committee. “I could see that being a barrier, for citizens and other interested people around the campus to get involved.”
As well as working with the PACCP, Restore Cootes collaborated with MacGreen, OPIRG McMaster and a group of “McMaster Marsh” professors. The professors have also been advocating that a currently closed portion of the lot be repurposed to become an outdoor research facility, to serve both students and faculty.
“What they’re doing now is the minimum requirement for today’s standards of a healthy, coldwater creek,” Kay explained. “Doing the minimum is what needs to be done… doing more would be great.”
