Municipal Governments

Municipal governments have the potential to make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality. Current efforts are largely uncoordinated and without an overall plan. While most municipal governments share the federal and provincial governments’ concerns about climate change and air quality, most municipalities, both large and small, have limited fiscal resources to meet the challenges associated with implementing programs within their jurisdictions. Propane as a transportation fuel offers municipalities an opportunity to reduce emissions and also save on operating costs for their high consumption light duty vehicles.

Most municipal governments have fiscal issues with having to respond to public pressure on minimizing property and other tax increases, increasing infrastructure needs and meeting new requirements to upgrade water and sewage treatment facilities, improving landfill design, enhancing waste diversion, improving public transportation systems and increasing policing within their communities. It has been widely reported that Canadian cities because of their reliance on property tax revenues are unable to respond to environmental and other responsibilities. The issue is even more prevalent in Canada’s rural, remote and northern communities where revenues are not sufficient to cover costs of delivering services or implementing programs.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) represents 1,400 municipalities, both large and small, in Canada. The FCM and its member communities recognize that reducing emissions and energy consumption can result in significant financial, social and environmental benefits for their communities. Municipal governments own and operate numerous facilities and transportation equipment and provide a wide range of services, including those that generate greenhouse gas and other emissions. In addition, they have influence over land use practices, transportation systems, the energy efficiency of community building stock and the sources of energy used.

There is a strong business case for reducing municipal energy use and costs and lowering emissions, because these actions can lead to lower operating costs and capital costs and fewer demands on physical assets. Actions to reduce emissions will yield significant environmental, social and economic results for Canada, yet a national or even provincial strategy has not been developed, although more recently a number of the provinces have committed funding for municipal climate change and other environmental programs.

The Federal Government endowed FCM with $550 million to establish the Green Municipal Fund (GMF) to provide a long-term, sustainable source of financing for municipal governments and their partners. The GMF provides low interest loans and grants, builds capacity and shares knowledge to support municipal governments in developing communities that are more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. The GMF provides funding in three areas:

Plans – development of Sustainable Community Plans
Studies – feasibility studies and field tests related to brownfields, energy, transportation, waste and water
Projects – Capital projects related to brownfields, energy, transportation, waste and water.

The Green Municipal Corporation (GMC) is a not-for-profit company created and owned by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. GMC was specifically set up to help municipalities, regional corporations and municipal utilities access the federal Offset Credit Market by managing Offset Credits (validation, verification, certification and registration processes) and purchasing Offset Credits from municipal projects to aggregate them and sell them to large emitters.

Propane as a transportation fuel, with its lower carbon footprint, is well positioned to assist municipalities in reducing GHG emissions and improving air quality while also reducing costs. Propane is ideally suited to municipal fleets as vehicles are usually centrally fuelled and maintained.

High consumption municipal vehicles include police vehicles, para-transit vehicles as well as service and maintenance vehicles used in municipal operations. Examples of successful municipal propane fleet programs include London Police Services and Peel Region Transhelp. Both municipalities have reduced greenhouse gas emissions significantly while at the same time reducing their operating costs.