Vancouver council's gas plan goes up in smoke after fierce public pushback

It wasn’t easy, and it was uncomfortably close. But late Wednesday evening, the gas industry’s effort to re-introduce fossil fuel heating in new homes and buildings in Vancouver was mercifully defeated.

Mobilizing to confront the climate emergency desperately requires forward momentum. Instead, thanks to the unrelenting persistence of the fossil gas industry, countless Vancouver-area climate activists and organizations just spent untold hours over the last four months re-prosecuting a fight they had already won.

Under Vancouver’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, new buildings in the city have not been permitted to use fossil fuels for space and water heating since early 2022, a nationally precedent-setting policy that was widely seen as a beacon of genuine climate emergency action. But, in a surprise move this past July, Mayor Ken Sim and some of his centre-right councillors moved to re-allow gas in new homes, giving staff until this fall to bring forward a new, more “gas-friendly” policy.  

The local climate movement quickly organized. Understanding that the burning of so-called “natural” gas in buildings currently accounts for about 55 per cent of Vancouver’s local greenhouse gas emissions, and intent on defending this flagship climate policy, mobilization and letter-writing campaigns to city council were initiated by Stand.Earth, Dogwood, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), student climate groups, For Our Kids, the David Suzuki Foundation, Women Transforming Cities and others.  

Under the coordination of the Zero Emission Innovation Centre (ZEIC), green builders pushed back. A coalition of progressive businesses urged a rethink. The National Moderator of the United Church, Reverend Carmen Lansdowne, and Anglican Bishop John Stephens made a joint appeal to city councillors, imploring them not to take the city backwards, writing “Both our churches are actively involved in converting how we heat our buildings. We urgently need our elected leaders to make this task easier, not more difficult.”

Under the auspices of CAPE, nearly 150 health professionals wrote to the mayor and council urging a reconsideration, explaining, “Relying on gas, renewable or otherwise, in new buildings is not just an outdated approach but also a dangerous one. Gas appliances in homes release pollutants indoors and outdoors such as nitrogen dioxide and benzene, both of which are harmful to human health.”

The gas industry takes aim at municipal governments

Of course the gas industry and its front groups have been organizing too.

FortisBC has been rather low-profile through all of this, but their fingerprints have been everywhere. And in the gas company’s own submission to city council, they revealed their true desire – full and unimpeded access for gas.   

Much of the more public lobbying has been done by industry front groups, such as Resource Works (an advocacy group for British Columbia’s extractive industries) and the BC Coalition for Affordable and Dependable Energy (BC CADE, a lobby association that has brought together gas suppliers, some in the restaurant industry, a few unions, and local business associations).

In the days before the Vancouver vote, BC CADE and the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade jointly released a poll purporting to show Vancouver residents opposed to a ban on natural gas. But it was based on a flawed question that conveniently failed to mention that the ban only applies to new buildings; it’s not particularly surprising that people don’t want to be forced to retrofit their existing homes.

The gas industry pushback hasn’t occurred only in Vancouver. The same industry coalition also recently tried to get the suburb of Richmond to reverse its decision to prohibit gas in new buildings. Thankfully, that effort was narrowly rejected last month (for now anyway).

And as readers of Canada’s National Observer have seen, all this mirrors the machinations of Enbridge and the Doug Ford government to keep tying new homes into gas lines in Ontario.

Vancouver City Hall deliberates

This week’s Vancouver vote started with a presentation by the city’s own sustainability staff team, whose detailed report disputed assertions made by the mayor and the pro-gas councillors that re-allowing gas was needed to enhance affordability and speed up construction. The staff research found allowing gas back into new buildings would have “no meaningful impact on affordability,” and conversely, going all-electric now would spare homeowners costly retrofits down the road. Significantly, city staff warned that re-introducing gas would massively set back the city’s GHG reduction goals – increasing carbon pollution by the equivalent of adding 16,000 cars to the road.

142 speakers signed up to address council on this matter – so many that the deliberations had to extend into a second full day and evening.

A few spoke on behalf of the gas industry. But the speakers were overwhelmingly against allowing gas into new buildings, by a margin of 91 to 13 (there were a few no-shows).

Many referred to the more than 600 British Columbians who perished during the June 2021 heat dome, noting that electric heat pump systems would have provided summer cooling that could have kept these people alive. In a welcome development, a large number of the speakers were from the building industry, insisting that they know how to build just as quickly and cheaply – if not more so – without gas.

Mayor Sim, in a tortured final statement, stuck by his summer decision, based largely on the woeful premise that what Vancouver does doesn’t matter in the larger world. “I’m going to support natural gas,” he concluded.

As expected, the two Green councillors, Adriane Carr and Pete Fry, opposed re-allowing gas. 

More surprising were the three councillors from the mayor’s ABC party who joined them and deserve kudos for their bravery: Lisa Dominato, Peter Meisner, and most notably, Rebecca Bligh, who voted for re-allowing gas in July, but in recent weeks had signalled her second thoughts. She expressed disappointment that the July amendment happened without expert or community advice, and had consequently been based on incorrect information. “I believe we made the wrong decision [in July],” she said. “I also heard from young people who expressed disappointment with the July decision.” All of which led her to conclude that the city needed to continue its climate leadership.

In the end, the recommendation to re-allow gas was a 5-5 tie, which according to procedural rules means the proposal was defeated. 

Lessons learned

So, what are we to learn from this four-month ordeal?

On the positive side, we learned the climate movement is robust and will not take these rollbacks laying down. 

Conservative city councillors learned a hard lesson that they will suffer a political price for seeking to take us backwards on this task of our lives, and if nothing else, when they reopen matters such as this they will have to endure hours of public speakers.

And, as we face the prospect of full-on climate deniers in national leadership in both the U.S. and Canada, this Vancouver experience offers a telling and hopeful reminder that it is possible to split the centre-right vote as we struggle to hold on to past climate wins.

The episode also drives home that the gas industry pushback is never going to stop, whether through their direct efforts or via the proxy use of front groups such as BC CADE and the Board of Trade. The fossil fuel industry will never take no for an answer, and will keep revisiting this matter with individual municipalities, until such time as the provincial or federal government takes everyone out of this misery and simply makes it the law of the land that new buildings cannot tie into gas lines. Then we can all get to work on the longer-term and harder task of phasing gas out of existing homes and buildings.

But for now, worth savoring a rare climate victory.