Foreword

The issue of climate change is close to my heart. Since joining Edmonton City Council in 2007, I have been committed to bold action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Addressing emissions not only relates to the broader issue of climate disruption, it also factors into many other health, economic, and quality of life benefits. If Edmontonians want a vibrant, innovative, globally competitive city, we must become a leader on climate change and energy transition.

When The Way We Green plan came before Council in 2011, much of the discussion centered on what kind of engagement we would undertake to move an aspirational catalogue of measures toward implementation. I was enthusiastic when Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) approached me that same year about building a citizen-deliberation process into City decision-making on climate and energy questions. As the Council lead on the Environment portfolio, I reminded my colleagues that on the really tough aspects of climate change we had a rare opportunity to connect with global networks to help a variety of decision-making bodies navigate these problems.

Something municipalities have done effectively in Canada, and around the world, is to lead when there is an absence of leadership from sub-national and national governments. Edmonton City Council understood that a municipality could not alone deliver solutions to emissions for our city, much less our region, province, or country. That said, the majority of Edmonton councillors were comfortable with climate science which gave us an opportunity to make an important progressive statement. With regard to our responsibility for the emissions output from this community, we thought it essential to provide strong leadership where we could.

As an elected representative, I am reassured to know that when a diverse group of citizens is brought together in a room, given the facts and a chance to fully discuss an issue, that group will let you know with a remarkable degree of consensus what ought to be done. As a decision maker, I communicated to Edmonton City Council the deliberative process we were building with ABCD, which we considered a proxy for what citizens, so informed, would come up with. I described how public deliberation was a way to get beyond the issue polarization that we had struggled against, which resulted in overly general discussions of the issues with only directly affected special interests coming forward. We knew that including all relevant interests in the public deliberation was crucial to the success of this process. After all, Edmonton is an industry town with a huge stake in the fossil fuel business. If that perspective had been excluded, we would not have had all the stakeholders in the room and the process could have easily been discredited.

However, our society is more complicated and broadly composed than special interests and industry voices might suggest. It contains people of all age groups, from different cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic backgrounds; folks with various perspectives on these vexing questions. For example, Edmonton will very soon have the largest urban Indigenous population in the country and be the fifth-largest destination for new Canadians.¹ If we do not include individuals and groups that reflect the makeup of our city, then obviously we will miss the mark. The process had to genuinely register the diverse voices of our community to have credibility with the rest of the citizenry.

I was fortunate to attend sessions of the Edmonton panel of the ABCD and had the opportunity to observe the process at work. At these sessions, I interacted with panelists and saw true diversity reflected—the kind of diversity that you would observe in a room of regular Edmontonians. I watched the journey unfold over six weeks and noted the remarkable consensus that the participants came to by the conclusion of the process. As a first-hand observer, I can say that the process had real meaning. Subsequently, I remained in contact with some of the panelists who had taken it upon themselves to advocate and lead the community on this issue. That was one of the most inspiring dividends—that and giving our city administration the confidence that citizens, given the opportunity to debate and become informed about this issue, would arrive at a strong consensus, the very same consensus that our Council reached when the Energy Transition Strategy came to us for a decision in 2015.

The Citizens’ Panel showed Council that a representative group of citizens, armed with good information, had come to the same conclusion that our administration recommended: that we should take action, that there was an upside to this action, and that reducing greenhouse gas impact was not the only benefit. Addressing greenhouse gases is an important issue in itself but there are associated benefits to mitigating climate change around cost savings for individuals and businesses, as well as improvements in air quality that everybody can appreciate, regardless of their position on the larger matter of reducing reliance on carbon. What surprised me most about the Edmonton deliberation is that the panelists remained engaged even though it took over two years for their recommendations to move from the panel process to Council approving the Energy Transition Strategy. The determination of the panelists to remain involved—remain champions of the strategy that they supported as citizens—is inspiring.

Given the value of the Citizens’ Panel, I think that deliberative methodology could restore a kind of authenticity to citizen engagement in many other tough conversations that cities need to have. It’s not right for everything we do, but it’s valuable for some of the more intractable problems: whether it’s poverty or economic diversification. At this moment, I do not know of any city where people feel genuinely connected to their government, think they have a say in its functioning, or see their views reflected as much as they might if there were effective deliberative processes embedded in the way the city came to decisions.

When it comes to understanding what Edmontonians think about particular and multifaceted issues like climate change, good deliberation procedures would make jobs like mine a lot easier. We can conduct surveys to figure out how citizens think based on their current knowledge of a topic, yet that is often an incomplete picture of the state of things. If citizens can see a representative group of their peers (who have gone through an authentic deliberative process) come to a set of recommendations that may be challenging and not simply compromised, middle-of-the-road outcomes, then a policymaker can conclude with reasonable confidence that citizens will accept such strong recommendations. The records from these kinds of guided and informed deliberation processes also provide open and transparent information to citizens wanting to know how a given deliberative panel arrived at their decisions. This book is an example of such a record while also containing reflections on the landscape of deliberative democracy as a movement for re-invigorating public consultations.

The City of Edmonton’s partnership with ABCD produced a valuable deliberative process on climate change and energy transition. I think it is a model that we will look to again when tackling some of the other wicked problems that face cities and communities in the twenty-first century. The book in front of you contains the lessons of that deliberative engagement—though it is the strategic plan and its implementation that are ultimately its substance. Hopefully these types of activities can begin to positively change the discussion, and public perception, about the democratic role of informed consultation in city government.

Don Iveson
Mayor, City of Edmonton

Don Iveson was elected as a City Councillor for Southwest Edmonton in 2007. During his two terms as Councillor, he was the lead for the Environment portfolio when a high level, aspirational strategic plan called The Way We Green was developed and passed by Council. The most controversial element of this Strategy dealt with climate change and energy transition. Mayor Iveson recognized citizen deliberation as a way to move City work on climate and energy transition forward, and he helped Alberta Climate Dialogue develop the partnership with the City that would lead to the Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges, which was convened from October to December of 2012. In 2013, Iveson was elected Mayor of Edmonton, where he saw the Citizens’ Panel recommendations incorporated into an Energy Transition Strategy that was passed unanimously by City Council in May 2015.

1 Statistics Canada. (2011). “Immigration and Ethnocultural Diversity in Canada.” http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-010-x/99-010-x2011001-eng.cfm