Like many cities, the City of Ottawa got interested in climate change early on. It set ambitious targets, only to realize they were extremely demanding if not impossible to meet. It thus scaled back its ambition, and the history of its response at the overall level of the City Council can be characterized in two ways. On the one hand, it responded to the emergence of city networks on climate change to do enough to report to the network of Canadian cities – the Partnership for Climate Protection – and meet its expectations. But these expectations have throughout been minimal – to create inventories of emissions, develop plans for them, and monitor progress. On the other hand, the City has, episodically, generated moments of enthusiasm for action on climate change, developing more overarching plans and a variety of specific initiatives. These bursts of energy occurred around 1991, 2004, and 2012–13. But in none of them did the burst of energy turn into sustained attention. We focus our analysis on the period through to 2014 when the Air Quality and Climate Change Management Plan (AQCCMP) was adopted.1 In part this is because the main patterns are easily identified up to this date, and in part because Chapters 5 and 6 discuss two particular aspects of the more recent politics (Complete Streets, and intensification) in more detail.

In Chapter 2 we saw the limits of thinking about climate politics only through the notion of politics as a site or arena. There are two main aspects to this argument. One is that we miss lots of what ought to be regarded as political activity on climate change with this sort of one-dimensional account of politics. But the other is that the site itself becomes thought of as static, simply ‘there’. But political sites are historical creations, and are constantly, if often subtly, being remade. This chapter focuses on two, intertwined aspects of how Ottawa as a city is being made and remade as a political arena through climate change politics. The first of these is the entanglement of the City in a set of networks of municipalities, both generally and specifically on climate change. The second is through the principal governance strategy of these networks, carbon accounting, a strategy that is widely understood as depoliticizing. Both of these have structured how the City has dealt with climate change in specific ways, explored throughout the chapter.

To think politically about climate change, we need to elaborate the arguments I sketched out via the University of Ottawa divestment story in Chapter 1. First, we need to conceptualize explicitly what we mean by politics. Second, we need to think about the political drivers of (and obstacles to) climate change action, a question I will suggest can be understood via a notion of cultural political economy. Third, we need to think about the dynamics that arise out of these first two, which I take to be two-fold: On the one hand a recurring dynamic between depoliticization and repoliticization, and on the other hand a tension I characterize as ‘purification vs. complexity’, between the instinct to want to find simple ‘solutions’ or enemies to fight, and the multidimensional qualities of the high carbon world that needs to be transformed. To start, however, it is perhaps worth thinking a little about how climate change is commonly conceptualized and framed, in public discourse as well as across various academic disciplines, in order to tease out what the politics of these specific climate change frames are.

In April 2016, the University of Ottawa made a curious decision regarding climate change. The previous couple of years saw campaigning by student groups, supported by some academics, to get the University to divest the holdings in its pension funds and endowments from fossil fuels. This was in common with divestment campaigns on many other university campuses across North America and beyond, as well as in churches and some larger institutional investors. In response, the University announced that it would not divest from fossil fuels but later on in the report making this announcement, it stated that it would take the investments out of the various fossil fuel companies it had holdings in, and shift that money into ‘clean energy’ investments. In other words, it decided to divest from fossil fuels but would not accept publicly that it was doing this (see Chapter 8 for a longer discussion of this episode).

While I was finalizing the first draft of this book, in early 2019, the world saw an upsurge in radical protest activity over climate change. Extinction Rebellion, centred on the UK but spreading, the school strikes for climate initiated by Greta Thunberg but now occurring worldwide, the Sunrise Movement in the US, declarations of ‘climate emergency’ by municipalities worldwide and some national governments, and the radicalized vision of climate change (at least relative to previous incarnations) embodied in the Green New Deal (GND): All have repoliticized climate change in the terms I have been discussing, by bringing climate change squarely into the realm of public collective decision-making, articulating their activism as opposition to powerful forces destroying the climate, and emphasizing the conflictual qualities of climate change. This is of course against a background of recurrent activism that has similarly repoliticized climate change: At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conferences of the Parties from the Hague in 2001 onwards; in organizations such as Plane Stupid and Climate Camp; over oil pipelines in Western Canada and elsewhere, coalmines in Australia, fracking in many places; over divestment from fossil fuels in universities and churches; and in new coalitions in international climate negotiations led by radical governments in Bolivia and Ecuador.

If the University of Ottawa exemplifies the ways that public institutions have focused on energy demand management and new forms of infrastructure (in their case, innovations within buildings), we also saw in Chapter 7 that there has been significant activity by community and private sector initiatives focused more on changing energy supply. Here we focus in more detail on one particularly prominent initiative, the Ottawa Renewable Energy Cooperative (OREC).

The previous chapters started with the simple idea of politics as a specific site, focused on the public authority of the City Council. However, we quickly showed the limits of this one-dimensional account of politics as a site, exploring its various other dimensions within the processes of the City. Nevertheless, we remained within the City Council as the central site of politics, despite the odd foray into other arenas such as Carbon 613, which we discussed to show how the City as a site of climate politics was in part being constituted.

Complete Streets represent conscious attempts to remake place-specific urban infrastructures in ways to enable low carbon pathways. But they help us understand at the same time that the production of carbon pathways – high or low – has the patterns of urban development at their heart. How we make space available for specific types of mobility, including whether we enable people to access daily resources and amenities without needing to travel large distances, is key to the carbon trajectories of cities. Attempts to shift these sorts of mobilities have, as was seen in Chapter 5, generated powerful conflicts. In this chapter, we see that these conflicts over how we move about, and the infrastructures that enable that movement, have parallels in conflicts over where we live, and the decisions about where new buildings go up, what types of buildings go up, and who gets to make those planning decisions. In Ottawa, as in many North American cities, these conflicts have been over the term ‘intensification’, a specific bit of planning language, loosely focused on increasing urban density, around which much contestation has occurred (see also Leffers and Ballamingie 2013; Leffers 2015a, 2015b).

As we saw in Chapter 7, educational institutions – the city’s two universities, two colleges, and two school boards – play a large role in generating governance initiatives on climate change in Ottawa. They are central to the cluster of public initiatives focused on building new sorts of infrastructure and managing energy consumption. Of these, the University of Ottawa (I will use either UofO or simply ‘the University’ as shorthand) is significantly the most active. This chapter explores in more detail climate politics within that university.

While the City was developing climate policy in fits and starts, as shown in Chapter 2, there was plenty going on in the City that shaped the patterns of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across the city, reflecting what we talked about in Chapter 1 as ‘implicit climate politics’. At the same time, while much of the explicit climate politics in the city reflected relatively low levels of political conflict, operationalized for example through the smooth technical arena of carbon accounting, the conflict dimension of politics has been much more central regarding questions of transport and planning.