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Letter: District of Squamish falls short on climate

'We need to be pursuing policies that create and protect workers’ ability to live here with the jobs our community already has.'
climate
The District of Squamish released a new Climate Action Squamish website recently.

The District of Squamish released a new Climate Action Squamish website recently.

It’s nice. Some pretty photos, a link to the IPCC website. A call to become a “Climate Action Champion” and try out the individual carbon footprint calculator -- never mind that the individual carbon footprint was invented by British Petroleum in 2004 as part of a public relations campaign designed to shift blame for climate change from oil companies to individuals.

Mostly, it’s a friendly way of communicating the information and goals contained in the 83-page Community Climate Action Plan released last year.

Two of the District’s six “Big Moves” are focused on transportation and private vehicle use, as they should be: transportation is the largest source of emissions in our community accounting for 52% of our total emissions. The CCAP proposes a number of strategies to decrease private vehicle use and improve non-vehicular transit options and these are great, though I’d like to see a lot more funding directed towards safe pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.

But when they set a goal to “Get more people working in Squamish,” they are just giving lip service to the elephant in the room and completely ignoring the other half of this issue: housing affordability. As many others have written, housing policy is climate policy. In urban environments, that’s because expensive housing drives the working class to cheaper, more suburban areas away from the city centre. In Squamish, we have a different issue: expensive housing drives people to commute into the city where there are more jobs and higher wages.

According to the 2016 census, 38.5% of Squamish’s workforce commutes more than 30 minutes, meaning out of our community. I’m not alone in suspecting those numbers have risen since then.

If we’re serious about reducing our community’s emissions, we need to recognize that climate action does not exist in a vacuum: that it needs to be considered as a priority across all sectors of municipal governance. In particular, we need to recognize that housing policy, economic policy, and our largest source of emissions are closely intertwined and to begin treating affordable housing as a top priority for our community’s sake and for the climate’s sake.

We need to be pursuing policies that create and protect workers’ ability to live here with the jobs our community already has.

Nick Gottlieb

Squamish

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