More great news coming from the City of Calgary!
In recent months, Calgary led the charge against the divisive and unCanadian “flying of foreign flags” with its own ban on this dodgy practice.
Now it seems that some newly elected municipal councillors in Calgary have initiated the process to repeal Calgary’s 2021 climate emergency declaration.
Climate emergency declaration? What is that?
For those old enough to remember politics before the Covid-19 pandemic, the green left and other virtue-signallers got swept away in the euphoria of having their local municipality declare that there was a legitimate “climate emergency” and that something had to be done immediately.
The climate declaration panic started in Australia and then swept the “democratic” world, especially in North America and Europe. Here is what I wrote about it last year (January 21, 2025) in Alarmism, Australia & (Tony) Abbott, which can be found on the Municipal Watch website:
Climate emergencies were also declared throughout the Province of Quebec in 2018, with climate change emergency debates spreading to council chambers across most cities and towns in English Canada in 2019. The result: a veritable tsunami of climate emergency declarations!
Did mainstream Canadian political opinion suddenly lurch dramatically leftward in 2019, so far left that middle-class awareness of climate change led, overnight, to a “climate crisis”? Did the milquetoast municipal political class of hundreds of Canadian municipalities suddenly find radical left green religion? Uh, no.
The green left activists who impressively orchestrated dozens, and then hundreds, of climate emergency declarations across Canada in 2019 soon discovered that the same bandwagonism that prompted lemming-like municipal politicians in this country to declare “climate emergencies” quickly reduced these declarations to a pathetic status of empty virtue-signalling symbolism.
Following the hundreds of 2018 and 2019 municipal climate emergency declarations, there was virtually no follow-up action – anywhere – by these municipal councils. Why not? No doubt municipal leaders were distracted for quite a while by the COVID-19 outbreak and, after that, a multitude of other pressing issues. But quite a lot of time passed, and still nothing happened. No new policies, no sense of urgency. And so the climate emergency deception became apparent to those paying attention.
Perhaps it wasn’t a true emergency after all.
From 2016 to 2019, climate emergency declarations started out as a radical far-left green strategy, then became a very mainstream concept. And when nothing was done about them, these same declarations revealed the climate “crisis” to be merely the old wines of “global warming” and “climate change” in a new bottle.
In short, there was no climate emergency back in 2019. And there isn’t one today. “
Five years after its 2021 “climate emergency” declaration, Calgary’s current city council is looking at possibly… maybe… scrapping the policy.
With a new mayor and some new councillors, things are really looking up in Calgary. And Municipal Watch hopes that other cities and towns in Canada are taking notice.
One of two motions calling for the city’s climate emergency declaration to be rescinded was announced in April by Andre Chabot, a six-term councillor who points out that using the term “climate emergency” is “largely symbolic” but not harmless in that it leads to significant expenditures.
In other words, it’s costly – to taxpayers! – to virtue signal in this way.
Let’s face it: when the previous council passed this declaration in 2021, it wanted to appear to care about an issue that was, at the time, higher on Canadians’ list of priorities. But that was before affordability and trade issues reshaped the political landscape and pushed nearly every other issue aside.
Credit to Councillor Chabot for including a full audit of all climate-related spending in his motion. With a $26 million budget, the climate and environment department is not exactly operating on chump change.
“Climate change isn’t something we can do as a city,” said Councillor Chabot. He added that reducing airborne pollutants, pursuing practical adaptation and mitigation measures, and cutting bureaucratic climate red tape (in housing policy, for example) would go much further toward improving life for Calgarians in the long run.
As a city, creating environmental standards is acceptable, but imposing climate policy restrictions and red tape on ordinary citizens is “overreach,” Chabot said. “At a municipal level, we have core responsibilities that are delegated by other levels of government to fulfil.”
Well said. When cities spend time and money embedding meaningless climate-emergency language into every aspect of their work, intricately woven and difficult-to-track spending often follows. And it takes away from the time, funds and commitment they should be spending in their own backyards – literally.
Chabot’s motion and a related motion by Councillor Landon Johnston will be debated at a future Calgary City Council meeting. Let’s hope it happens soon and that it spurs other municipalities to start looking into their own not-so-harmless, not-so-urgent, climate “emergency” declarations.