Chairman's Message
Imagine Canada's 5400 cities and communities - 120 big and medium sized and more than 5200 rural, remote, aboriginal and northern - being the most sustainable and liveable in the world.
Sustainable communities offer a prosperous economy, a healthy environment, social inclusion and a culture rich in creativity and innovation. The heart of any community is its infrastructure: energy, water and waste, buildings and transportation. Learning how to get better at planning, deploying and ultimately integrating these separate infrastructures is the key to building the sustainable communities of the future.
By being sustainable, our cities and communities would provide a high quality of life for its citizens and would make Canada competitive in attracting and retaining a creative, highly-skilled and educated workforce, and the enterprises and investment that follows them. By incorporating integrated energy thinking with sustainability planning, we can help Canadian communities to strengthening their local competitiveness and adapt to the challenges of the future while actively mitigating greenhouse gases and adapt to a changing local climate.
Many communities are already moving towards sustainable city strategies and integrated community energy systems and solutions: Guelph, with Canada's award winning Community Energy Plan, Calgary and their integrated Municipal Development Plan and growing district energy system, Dawson Creek with their community-led and consensus-based sustainability plan, Fredericton and it's Sustainability By Design guiding framework, Halifax Regional Municipality and its urban sector driven energy plan, Quebec City's La Cité Verte green neighbourhood and Vancouver with Canada's best growth management strategy. These and other leading communities are increasingly implementing strategies in coordination with the energy, development and financing industry that integrate innovative energy solutions into their land-use planning, building design, transportation networks, water, wastewater and solid waste infrastructure.
These communities and their businesses and residents are our leaders and increasingly we are starting to see more and more communities and industry follow in their footsteps. But more can and needs to be done to remove the financial, regulatory, governance, zoning, cultural, and other barriers these communities and industry are facing to advance integrated energy systems.
That is why QUEST, Canada's national voice for ICES, is actively working with our network of Caucuses, contributors, partners and community builders from coast to coast to coast to tackle head-on the challenges to implementing ICES for local industry and municipalities, and to making QUEST's nationally endorsed energy decision-making principles and polices central to sustainable community development.
I invite you to join QUEST through our Caucuses and become part of the solution to making Canada a world leader in the design, develop and application of integrated community energy systems and solutions.
Michael Harcourt
QUEST Chairman
