Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
The most significant contributor to climate change under the purview of the city is sprawl. If the city put more effort into curtailing sprawl this declaration might be a less vacuous and meaningless gesture.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Truenorth00
Absolutely. It's disgusting how much sprawl has been allowed. Not just in Ottawa. But in cities throughout this country. And it's particularly egregious when most of Ottawa inside the greenbelt is pretty damn suburban by any definition that does not come from an Ottawan living in Kanata or Orleans.
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Because post-amalgamation Ottawa's city limits are so large and well outside the built-up area, limiting sprawl is maybe more feasible here than in cities where separate rural communities are right at the built-up edge. While there are people who want their large spaces who commute in from (actual) out of town currently, I suspect that the distances are still great enough that, if Ottawa were to make zoning/policy changes that reduced the supply of sprawling new construction, not everyone will want to move that far out to another jurisdiction that would be outside such measures.
On another angle, given the debate on the carbon tax I thought I'd work out our family's cost based on the last 12 months and what we know of the extra taxes:
- Fuel (super convenient to use fuelly.com to track this!): 751.46 L x $0.044/L = $33.06. We spent $1009.05 over the year, so that's a 3% increase
- Natural gas: 1695 m3 x $0.0391/m3 = $66.27. We spent $790.41 over the year, so that's an 8% increase
If our household carbon tax credit is $269 (2 adults and 1 child as per
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment...k/ontario.html) then overall we're ahead $169.67.
Alas that rebate is pretty useless when it comes to encouraging choices that could bring our consumption down. We already spend $2330 on transit passes, and any meaningful renovations to our home to lower our heating costs (e.g. window replacements, insulation fill; we already keep the thermostat at 17-19 during the winter) would be much more expensive.
A carbon tax that came with a meaningful income tax deduction (e.g., Conservative candidate Michael Chong proposed a 10% overall income tax reduction, with the highest rate reduced from 33% to 29%*) would have been more useful to drive actual behaviour change and meet national targets.
Anyone else care to share your numbers?
(*Just using a Conservative example for argument sake (
https://www.nationalobserver.com/201...bon-tax-plan): presumably it would be the most palatable option amongst Canadians who are opposed to the current plan. Besides that, the plan needs to address the concerns about competitiveness with other places without carbon taxes. It was in fact part of the Nobel prize winning research that suggested a carbon tax in the first place - a "climate club" tariff that would apply to jurisdictions without similar carbon taxes (
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2...aus-slides.pdf). The current plan should not have gone forward without this as well.)