New Westminster city council will continue to collect a climate action levy from its electrical customers.
At Monday’s meeting, council considered a motion from Coun. Daniel Fontaine to eliminate the 3.5 per cent climate action levy from the New Westminster Electrical Utility for one year and to incorporate this change into the city’s 2025 operating budget.
The preamble to Fontaine’s motion stated that temporarily removing the climate action levy would help residents and businesses deal with inflationary pressures. It said there is no evidence that made-in-New Westminster levies, taxes or fees on green energy generated by BC Hydro will reduce the city’s carbon footprint.
“We're charging 3.5 per cent, a levy, on everybody's electrical utility bill,” Fontaine said. “Regardless of their income, regardless of where they live, they all have to pay it.”
Fontaine said that temporarily removing the levy would provide some relief to taxpayers. While it may not be a massive amount of relief for residents, he said it would help those who have been hit by property tax hikes.
It’s not the first time Fontaine has tried to convince council to do away with the levy that’s collected by the city’s electrical utility.
In December 2023, council voted 4-2 against Fontaine’s amendment to the electrical utility bylaw to remove the 3.5 per cent climate action levy from the electrical utility bill. Back then, council defeated the amendment three times because Fontaine put forward the same amendment for each of the three readings of the bylaw.
Betty Furey, a member of the New Westminster climate action hub, urged council to oppose the motion to temporarily eliminate the climate action levy on electrical accounts.
“I was surprised that this motion was back tonight,” she told council Monday night. “I spoke at a meeting a year ago about this motion, and at that time the motion was defeated.”
Furey said the removal of the climate action levy from electrical bills will not have much of an impact in addressing the inflationary pressures being experienced by residents. However, she said the levy will help grow a fund that will make a difference to community members in the long run and will provide money for solutions that will make a difference to the health and safety of New West residents.
“Stopping something that is in place doesn't work. There will be blocks trying to reintroduce it after a year's time,” she said about a proposal to temporarily stop collecting the levy. “People don't notice it so much when it goes away, but I think you notice it if you try to bring it back.”
Fury said the weekend’s atmospheric river in B.C. highlighted the local impacts of climate change and emphasized the impacts of the climate crisis.
“What is happening locally this weekend was indeed a crisis; it's not going to get better without intervention,” she said. “Three people died this weekend locally, as a result of a house being swept away in the storm. Six houses are under evacuation in Deep Cove as a result of heavy rain. There is devastation in States in the United States, and devastation in Cuba, where they are pounded by hurricanes that have come earlier.”
Motion defeated
Later in the meeting, a majority of council members voted against Fontaine’s proposal.
Council members opposing the motion said the money from the levy goes into the city’s climate action reserve fund, which will help the City of New Westminster address some of the impacts of climate change.
“As we sit on the heels of a huge extreme weather event this weekend, I think we can see the impacts to our community happening in real time,” said Coun. Tasha Henderson.
Henderson said the city will be facing some “real costs” to manage what will become increasingly common extreme weather events in the community, such as atmospheric rivers. She noted flooding occurred on parts of Quayside Drive during last weekend’s heavy rainfall.
Henderson expressed concern about council members saying they support projects related to climate action but then oppose the sources of funding for those initiatives.
“I guess I'll use the words my colleague has used before; You can't suck and blow at the same time,” she said. “It feels counter-intuitive to me, so I won't be supporting it tonight.”
Fontaine responded by saying the climate action levy is not the primary source of funding for the city’s climate action reserve fund. He said the levy generated about $2 million for the reserve fund in 2023.
Fontaine said last weekend’s climate event happened even though the climate action levy was in place. He argued that lowering emissions is the way to see a reduction in climate-related events.
Fontaine said it is not fair to say the city should be supporting the climate action levy because the city had a weather-related event on the weekend.
“We can tax, tax and tax the electrical utility till the cows come home – it is still going to rain,” he said.
Mayor Patrick Johnstone said the motion’s preamble included some inaccuracies, including the impact that eliminating the 3.5 per cent levy would actually have on taxpayers as some of those costs would need to be found elsewhere in the budget. He said the levy helps fund items in New Westminster’s budget, including the city climate action staff and the Energy Save New West – a program he said saves residents money every day.
“But the largest part of this of this is designed to actually offset the property tax impact of the capital investments that we need to do in order to make climate action happen in the city, including Energy Save New West,” he said. “So, to say there's no evidence that this reduces our carbon footprint is simply not true; even just in the way that it funds the Energy Save New West program is enough to reduce the carbon footprint in this city.”
Fontaine’s motion stated that the BC NDP government “has now backed away “from its support of the “costly and unaffordable carbon tax” that currently imposed on consumer products. (In September, David Eby pledged that a re-elected NDP government would scrap British Columbia’s carbon tax, which has been in place since 2008, if the federal government ends the requirement for this tax.)
Johnstone stressed that the climate action levy is not a carbon tax.
“It's not intended to be a carbon tax. It's intended to raise money in order to do climate action in the city,” he said. “So again, it's disingenuous to compare the two, and to always refer to it in the context of the carbon tax.”
Johnstone said council has considered “a lot of motions” this year to fund everything from new firefighters to trees out of the city’s climate action fund. In the past two weeks, he said council has considered motions about the climate action levy and the low carbon fuel credits, which would cut money going into that fund.
“That fund is important. It does good work in the city, and I can't support cutting off the funding to it,” he said.
During a recent discussion about a Sue Big Oil motion, Fontaine proposed an amendment that the City of New Westminster immediately ban the acceptance of funds from Big Oil for any form of sponsorships or the sale of carbon credits. Council unanimously supported the part of the amendment related to sponsorships but voted 4-2 in favour of striking out the reference to carbon credits.
Fontaine said his motion was not about cutting off funding to the climate action reserve fund but about selling the city’s carbon credits to Big Oil.
“What we said is we don't want money from Big Oil,” he said. “That's very different than cutting off the funding for the program.”
In a 2022 news release, the City of New Westminster stated that suppliers of transportation fuels with a high carbon intensity (such as gasoline or diesel) are required to reduce the carbon intensity of their fuels. One option for doing this is through the purchase of low carbon fuel credits generated by suppliers of transportation fuels with a low carbon intensity (such as electricity or biodiesel).
New Westminster earns credits as a result of having its own electrical utility - by providing electricity to propel SkyTrain and to charge electric vehicles. In 2022, the City of New Westminster sold fuel credits it had earned between 2013 and 2020 to Elbow River Marketing Ltd. for $26 million and used that money to establish a new climate action reserve fund to support its commitment to a zero carbon future.
