Email from Ian Brown Re: Official Community Plan
Citizen feedback recommending policy changes for heat pumps, electric vehicle charging, and sea-level rise flood planning in the OCP.
From: margaret and Ian Brown Sent: March 17, 2025 11:28 AM To: Mayor And Council Email mayorandcouncil@viewroyal.ca Subject: Official Community Plan
To: Mayor and Council
Dear Mayor and Councillors
I am writing this since I recently visited the open house on the Official Community Plan and found nowhere there to leave this feedback. Mr. Scory suggested that I write you.
View Royal has been a leader in actions to prevent even more global overheating by bringing in the Carbon Step Code to stop the heating of new buildings by burning fossil fuels, to join the “Sue Big Oil” project to recoup some the costs this heating will cause the Town and by declaring a Climate Emergency.
I was shocked and disappointed to find no reference, at this open house, to View Royal's future in tackling climate overheating.
To tell you where I am coming from I will state some facts that I think most of you know quite well:
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, compiled by thousands of senior scientists, endlessly cross checking each other's results, tell us that the human race is on track to raising global temperatures by 3 degrees C this century
- The same scientists calculate that this temperature rise will create deep and widespread drought that will cause huge crop failures all over the world (even here) and lead to starvation and many times increases in food prices everywhere.
- When this occurs, in about 20 to 30 years, in the struggle for any food, no one will care about any of the other topics included in our OCP
As a result, I think the primary topic, to be tackled first, is what the Town of View Royal will do about global overheating.
The two main sources of carbon emissions in our Town are building heating and motor vehicles.
With future buildings taken care of, we now need to tackle the several thousand gas and oil furnaces in existing buildings. We should find a way to forbid the renovation of such heating systems, requiring that old and decaying systems be replaced only by heat pumps or, less efficiently, other electric systems. We should also have a planning officer who is right up to date with senior government rebates for such installations so the public can consult one such up to date resource. We should be lobbying the Provincial Government to vastly improve the competition in heat pump installing, which is now dominated by established businesses charging outrageous prices. All this should be officially part of our plan.
As for electric vehicles, for our residents, we should require that every parking space at every residence be wired for either 110 volt or 220 volt charging. A dedicated 110 Volt circuit does very nicely for a single residential unit. We should require this for all new builds right now. We need, also, to figure out how to incentivize installation of such charging for established residences, especially multiple residential buildings. We should also be lobbying higher levels of government to remove the 100% import tax on Chinese vehicles and find a way to encourage their sales here, given they produce much cheaper electric vehicles.
A plan for the next thirty years should also deal with what the Town is going to do about flooding from sea level rise. I am thinking of around Portage Inlet and up Craigflower Creek.
These are a few of the actions I would like to see firmly embedded in an Official Community Plan long before questions of building height, building density and Town Centres. I would encourage staff and the Committee to create other avenues to getting View Royal residents off of gasoline and natural (so called) gas.
Sincerely
Ian D. Brown