Are the city's efforts to stimulate economic growth while preserving a clean environment a case of Ottawa trying to have its cake, and eat it too?

A detailed report released this month by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) finds that economic growth, and the urban expansion it normally triggers, can indeed negatively influence the quality of the municipal environment.

But according to Ian Cross, program manager for research and forecasting in the city's planning and growth management department and a member of the team that authored the report, municipal development doesn't necessarily have to be reduced to a zero-sum, economy-verses-environment trade-off.

"It doesn't have to be that way," Mr. Cross said. "The general issue the study points out is there can often be, when the economy booms and incomes rise, negative effects on the environment."

Ottawa was one of the 20 Canadian municipalities participating in the study, which tracked a wide-range of data for the 10-year period ending in 2001. "Growth, the Economy and the Urban Environment" is the last of three reports in the FCM's Quality of Life Reporting System (QOLRS) series. This report focused on the analysis of 18 key QOLRS indicators including average income, hourly wages, water consumption, building permits, rental housing, urban transportation, air quality, bankruptcies, solid waste, and population growth and density.

Using Statscan census data, Environment Canada analytic expertise, and municipalities' actual development experiences, the report concludes that "while a vibrant local economy is generally considered to be a positive feature of quality of life, there is a real risk that continuously expanding urban populations, increasing incomes and growing economic activity will result in increased pressure on the quality of air, water and soil."

Despite the tempting array of data tabulated for each city, the report warns against making city-to-city comparisons. "Some caution is required when using the QOLRS to compare the 20 communities," because "largely urban communities ... have very different characteristics than regional municipalities with more suburban and rural areas."

Taken together, the cities that participated account for about 40 per cent of Canada's population, with Montreal the only major city that did not participate.

Nonetheless, the data clearly shows that Ottawa is among the top four cities for the highest percentage of walkers and cyclists, and along with Toronto and Vancouver, it had the highest rates of public-transit use.

But Mr. Cross went farther, and said "relative to many other cities, we are in an enviable position."

"We have a new Official Plan council adopted in 2003, and that encourages more compact development, higher residential densities, and more housing near transit-way stations and on main streets so people don't have to drive to do their day-to-day business." He said a number of appeals to the urban boundary start next month, especially in the west end between Stittsville and Kanata. These challenges, he emphasized, "very fundamentally play to the long-term planning direction this city will take because we don't wish to expand the urban boundary. We don't wish to foster yet more low-density suburban development. So we hope to win that little fight."

He also said that Ottawa is fortunate in its business sector, which is "heavily office-based, and although there is some manufacturing, a lot of it is the front-end activities around research and development. So it is quite clean and quite high-density employment, and therefore more conducive to 'green' transportation choices."

While many trends in Ottawa are going the right way, Mr. Cross concedes there are areas for improvement.

He notes, for example, that "we'd certainly like to do better in terms of higher transit use," adding that the city needs a greater increase than the one-per-cent rise in use between 1996 and 2001 to reach long-term objectives in the Transportation Master Plan. Among other things, the plan seeks to double the use of transit by 2021. That target requires completion of the light rail expansion project now underway.

Mr. Cross also points to the need for more high-density housing, a strategy Ottawa successfully followed until the early 1990s. In 1991, he said, about 40 per cent of housing starts in Ottawa were apartments, largely because there was a "very significant programme to build assisted-housing" that was partially funded by provincial and federal partners. Those programmes were "killed off in the mid 1990s" and are only very slowly coming back.

Although reluctant to venture into the controversy that even now surrounds the 2000 amalgamation of 12 former municipalities into the new city, Mr. Cross says the planning advantages to that process are starting to emerge. "We've been through this huge exercise of replacing 12 Official Plans with one Official Plan, and we're now in the process of consolidating and rewriting all the zoning bylaws, which is a gigantic job. Once all that work is done, from a planning perspective, it will be much simpler to understand what the zoning is on properties because it will be a city-wide system" where different zoning and development definitions used in former municipalities don't have to be continually revisited.

John Burrett, FCM's senior manager for social policy and the project manager of the QOLRS reports, says the report methodically and thoroughly establishes facts related to the importance of urban renewal, and establishes demonstrable proof of what many people knew intuitively. "A lot of what's in the report starts to sound obvious, but it's really good to put it on paper."

"If we want to do something about traffic, for example, and the negative effect it has on air quality, we need to be able to densify and invest in urban transit systems. There's no way around that. This (municipal) infrastructure really needs attention, and the scale of this involves all levels of government. It has to be implemented in municipalities, but it's going to have to involve the federal, provincial and territorial governments."

Mr. Burrett said that much of what is required for meaningful urban renewal is reflected in the February 2005 federal budget, such as gas tax revenue for municipal governments and additional funding to FCM's Green Municipal Funds, which supports studies and projects that encourage investment and deliver "significant environmental benefits."

With Bills C-43 and C-48 squeaking through the House of Commons last week to the next stage of committee review, Mr. Burrett hopes Canadian cities are one step closer to a clean sweep.

By Jeff Esau

Special to the Ottawa Business Journal