By Alex Aylett
Loving Montreal in the winter takes practice; loving it in the summer is easy. Festivals crop up everywhere, café tables spill out onto the streets, and parks overflow with people taking in the beauty of the days. This is the season when we show off our colours to the world. But according to a new Green Cities Index produced by The Economist, one colour that is not on display is green.
Released last week, the index evaluated 27 North American cities in nine key areas ranging from carbondioxide emissions to how they govern environmental issues. Montreal ranked 19th overall, and last among the four Canadian cities in the index - trailing Calgary by four spots. Other Canadian cities fared much better. Vancouver was ranked second overall, and Toronto also finished in the top 10. That a city as dynamic and creative as Montreal should have ranked so low raises important questions.
It is not all bad news for Montreal. We earned high marks in transportation, thanks to our high rate of non-automobile commuters (second only to New York,) and investments in public transit and cycling infrastructure. In total 29 per cent of us leave our cars at home when we head to work every morning. That's more than double the index average of 13 per cent, and well above Detroit's laggard four per cent. Our ranking was also bumped up because of our low per-capita carbon-dioxide emissions (thank Hydro-Québec for that one) and our high recycling rates.
You could probably have guessed that Montreal would have done well in those areas. They are all the result of decades of municipal and provincial investment. Where we've ranked poorly is more telling: Montreal has among the fewest per-capita LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified green buildings in the index; we use more energy per capita than the index average; and the carbon and energy efficiency of our local economy is abysmal. For every dollar of local gross domestic product, Montreal uses almost three times more energy than the index average. READ MORE >>
