When B.C.’s capital city mandated that all new buildings couldn’t produce any greenhouse gases as of July 2025, Victoria touted itself as a leader for bringing in the requirement five years ahead of the province’s timeline.
Half a year later and with a new set of councillors, the city could accelerate the already expedited timeline.
A Feb. 16 motion moved by half of Victoria’s councillors calls for staff to explore requiring all applications that need rezonings to include only electric systems for heating, cooling, hot water and cooking.
“In my view, we can move much quicker and we need to,” Coun. Dave Thompson said in an interview prior to the Feb. 16 meeting. “It’s a climate emergency and we need to be making sure that, as far as possible, we’re not building buildings with large greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years.”
The city’s 2025 mandate will be activated once the province implements its Carbon Pollution Standard – legislation allowing communities to limit the emissions from new buildings – which isn’t in place despite the expectation it would be by the end of 2022.
“Is it going to be clean enough? It’s hard to say because Fortis is always there doing its lobbying and serving its shareholders … (trying) to hook up as much natural gas as it can,” Thompson said, referring to B.C.’s natural gas distributor.
Buildings make up a third of Victoria’s total GHG emissions and that rises to just over 50 per cent of all air pollution in the city when combined with single-family residences’ impact.
Thompson said the councillors want to make sure the city has measures in place if the province continues its delay. While applauding the previous work on the file, the first-year councillor said the climate science floor is shifting fast and the city needs to take urgent steps in order to stay a leader. The councillors targeted rezonings as it was seen as a way to take action quickly.
“These buildings are going to be around for decades and if we build now with GHG-emitting systems, those systems are going to be locked in for decades.”
Having to retrofit structures would also be more costly than making them low-carbon in the first place, Thompson said. He hopes staff will come back with solutions to expedite the city’s current timelines, though he accepts it may be hard to do so for smaller buildings.
Under the city’s current direction, new buildings that are three storeys and under, with a footprint of 600 square metres or less, in most cases must use electricity for their space and water heating as of this July.
If their motion would be impossible or too costly to implement, the councillors ask staff to look into prioritizing development applications that include fully-electric systems.
The matter was postponed for a week as Thompson said he became aware that the province was potentially going to bring in legislation on Friday (Feb. 17) that would impact the motion.
READ: As natural gas use rises in Victoria, the city says it isn’t a clean energy source
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