Gregor Robertson is running to revive Canadian environmentalism
2025-04-25T09:09:08Z
The former Vancouver mayor oversaw a push for that city to become Canada’s greenest. Now, he’s hoping to bring his perspective and experience as an environmentalist to Ottawa.
Cities can “only change the course of history so far,” he said. Changing federal and provincial policies are vital in the fight against climate change, offering more clout and providing tools that can help municipal governments reduce their emissions.
Trump’s attacks on Canada and Mark Carney’s decision to become Liberal leader “tipped the scales” to run in Vancouver Fraserview-South Burnaby, which straddles Vancouver and Burnaby, BC. Carney reached out, seeing the former mayor’s expertise on making cities more sustainable — a call Robertson found difficult to refuse, he told Canada’s National Observer on a sunny April afternoon in Vancouver.
Talk to former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson long enough and it’s almost possible to believe his dream of reviving Canadian environmentalism in the face of Trump’s tariffs. Seven years after leaving City Hall in 2018, the charismatic figurehead of Vancouver’s push to become Canada’s “Greenest City” is jumping back into politics.
Elected in 2008 to “make Vancouver the greenest city in the world,” Robertson led a decade-long charge to reduce Vancouver’s carbon emissions and environmental footprint. By the time the Greenest City plan he implemented reached its conclusion in 2020, the city had reduced carbon emissions from new buildings by 81 percent compared to 2007, used 26 per cent less water per capita and sent a third less waste to landfills or incinerators.
Robertson started out as an organic farmer, then jumped into business the same year as Bula started covering the city, 1994, eventually turning his small carrot juice company, Happy Planet, into a health food-aisle staple that was sold to Earth’s Own (and eventually the Agrifoods cooperative) in the years following his departure.
“He’s a real believer,” said France Bula, a freelance journalist in Vancouver who’s been covering the city since 1994. “He’s not someone who adopted climate change because it was cool or because it was seen as politically saleable. Pretty much his entire life has been about trying to do environmentally conscious things.”
That legacy — along with his opposition to pipelines such as Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain — has earned him the label of being a “radical” and “anti-resource activist” by the Conservatives, with Poilievre repeatedly attacking the former mayor in speeches, on social media and in news releases. Robertson laughed off the label as a “desperate, crazy” attempt to prey on people’s fears and insecurities.
Talk to former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson long enough and it’s almost possible to believe his dream of reviving Canadian environmentalism in the face of Trump’s tariffs.
The Greenest City plan marked a key shift in Vancouver’s approach to environmental action, said Meg Holden, a professor of urban studies at Simon Fraser University. During the 1970s, the city was a hotbed of radical and largely anti-capitalist approaches to environmentalism — think Greenpeace, which was founded in Vancouver in 1971.
Robertson, ever the businessman, took a different tack. He consulted with people across the city and experts to craft a vision for the Greenest City, but also looked at how the private sector could help bankroll the transition. Robertson didn’t see a problem with the idea that environmentalism could be tied to investments and economic growth — a perspective that’s commonplace now, but wasn’t in the 2000s.
He was also willing to take risks, Holden said. For instance, he “had the nerve” to implement the sustainability-oriented building code changes that Vancouver made under Robertson’s tenure — but they proceeded to adopt their core elements after seeing Vancouver’s success, for instance BC’s Zero Carbon Step Code, which prohibits gas heating in new buildings.
She anticipates he’ll bring that entrepreneurial approach to federal politics, if elected.
Robertson hinted as much — and the combination of a national housing crisis and Trump’s tariffs offer a “really obvious” opportunity for climate action, he said.
“There’s a winning formula there that might not have been that easy to catalyze without [the tariff threats], so let’s use it to our advantage,” Robertson said.
Buildings account for roughly 18 per cent of Canada’s carbon emissions, making them the third-largest emitting sector after oil and gas and transportation. The country is also short about 3.5 million houses, especially in urban BC and Ontario, driving soaring housing costs nationwide.
The Liberals have pledged to build houses “at a scale and speed not seen since the Second World War” through a suite of public investment and support for private developers, if elected. That effort aims to fuel demand for Canadian materials, from wood to drywall, in addition to jobs and support for new green technology development.
Ensuring those federal initiatives actually help the municipal officials tasked with coordinating this massive homebuilding effort — the people approving new buildings, crafting zoning laws and building public infrastructure — is where Robertson sees himself being most useful.
“There is a need for that local voice and mayors’ perspective to be part of the team in Ottawa,” he said. “There’s lots of important policy and regulatory decisions that happen in Ottawa. They have to make a difference on the ground, but they have to have local relevance and benefits.”
Bula hinted she wasn’t surprised that helping foster those political relationships might be a major draw for the former mayor.
“I don’t think he particularly enjoys the ‘meeting everybody in the general public’ part of the job. He’s not awful — I’ve seen way worse — but it’s not something he’s really naturally inclined to,” she said. He sees his job as providing the leadership for experts to develop effective policies, and leading by example, like commuting regularly by bike, she said.
Still, Robertson said the past few weeks of campaigning have offered an interesting window into Canadians’ concerns.
“People are paying attention like never before,” he said. “Everybody is paying attention to what’s happened with Trump. And these are unsettling times. The silver lining is that people are looking for leadership, looking for change and smart approaches to the upheaval that’s thrust upon us.”
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