Mark Sutcliffe failed to deliver on his simplest promise | Opinion

All I want for Christmas is a decent tree canopy. Instead, all I’ve got is this rotten Yuletide tale of how the capital city of a country known around the world for its forests, a nation whose symbol is the maple leaf, can’t plant trees without tripping over red tape. Even Charles Dickens couldn’t make that make sense.

One of the promises Mayor Mark Sutcliffe made during the last campaign was to plant one million trees during his first mandate. Never has so simple a promise been so undelivered.

I am no expert arborist, but I’ve been alive a few decades and I have seen enough trees to know that it can’t be that complicated to grow them since they’re already kind of all over the place. Except where we really need them, evidently.

Ottawa has such a lousy tree canopy (defined very simply as how much of our collective space is shaded) that once, after a short but pleasant summer visit to Vancouver, my then-16-year-old exclaimed that Carling Avenue looked like a badly rendered video game because there are so few shadows. She had marvelled, walking the streets of downtown Vancouver, at how wonderful it is to walk under the protective shade of mature urban trees.

According to municipal staff, the tree canopy in Ottawa is about 36 per cent, as per the latest information we have on it, up a smidgen from the 2017 number of 34 per cent. While a modest improvement is welcome, it’s certainly not evenly distributed. Suburban areas like Stittsville, Riverside South and Barrhaven have seen significant losses in part due to land being cleared for new housing developments. You know, like when developers take a wild place and chop down all the trees, build a bunch of homes, each with a twig in the front yard and call the community Maple Grove or some such.

In a 2019 assessment of the tree canopy throughout the National Capital Region, the National Capital Commission noted that trees covered 45 per cent of urban Gatineau, compared to 31 per cent of urban Ottawa. Clearly, the numbers don’t align exactly, and I guess it depends on how you measure things. But either way, Ottawa’s number is significantly lower than the stated goal of having 40 per cent of our area covered by trees.

At the risk of stating the obvious, having a respectable tree canopy is more than just about making us look pretty. It helps us feel a little cooler in the summer, it clears the air of CO2 while producing oxygen, it helps with stormwater management, it makes traffic noises less loud, it supports birds and wildlife and it’s even supposed to be good for the mental health of human beings. Trees do all this for us in exchange for almost nothing except a little bit of tender loving care when they are small. And for reasons I cannot understand, we’re not out there every day planting more.

Recent reports suggest Sutcliffe’s promised program is bogged down in red tape. So far, since his 2022 election, the city has only planted 88,000 trees per year. As someone who stinks at math, I know there’s no way to add this up to a million trees by next year.

I get that we can’t just plant things willy-nilly. There are safety considerations, including the need to avoid digging where gas lines or electrical wires are buried. Exactly what species of trees should go where is also important to determine before planting, not after. We don’t want to go to the trouble of planting something that won’t survive more than two winters.

But for crying out loud, if this is a campaign pledge, can we not sort this out a little bit faster? This is Canada. We’re famous for trees. Get planting already, Mr. Mayor.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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