New Westminster mayor defends trip to climate summit in Dubai

FILE IMAGE: New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone’s trip to COP28 in Dubai in early December has become the subject of municipal debate.

New Westminster’s mayor is speaking out about his recent controversial trip to a climate summit in Dubai.

Patrick Johnstone participated in the Local Climate Action Summit as a part of the COP28 U.N. Climate Change Conference late last year. The trip was fully paid for by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership group, a global network of mayors working to fight climate change.

Two New Westminster city councillors have raised concerns about the trip, noting that the C40 group is partially funded by companies including Bloomberg, FedEx and Google, and say there has been a lack of transparency about the trip and how much it cost.

Video: New Westminster councillors seek answers for missing mayor

Speaking with Global News on Monday, Johnstone defended the trip as worthwhile, and said his participation violated no municipal rules.

“There has never been a policy or practice in this city where a member of council has had to seek permission from other members of council to attend work that is germane to our work on council,” Johnstone said.

“We have policies and procedures that allow us to attend conferences and do the city’s work at these conferences, and all of those policies and procedures were followed.”

Johnstone said he told the acting mayor and the city’s chief administrative officer before going, and that while his spouse joined him for a time in Dubai, she paid her own way.

He also disputed the characterization of the C40 cities group as a lobby group.

“C40 cities is actually a group of cities, the chair of c40 cities is the lord mayor of London,” he said. “They do raise funds from charitable organizations, they raise funds from federal governments and from local governments.”

Johnstone said he has travelled to policing, transportation and housing conferences in the past, and never faced any complaints about that work.

He argued that addressing climate change is also a core city function, but that critics only seem interested in targeting travel related to climate action.

“I think it was a useful trip for the city,” he said.

“I also think its important that local governments are represented at the local climate action summit and that we had more than 100 cities there engaging with the negotiators as a part of the framework conference.”

Video: New West councillors question mayor’s overseas trip

He said how to engage youth in climate action at the city level was a major topic of conversation, along with comparing best practices among cities on how to address climate change.

More on Politics

Johnstone went on to defend transparency around the trip, saying he’d written more than 5,000 words on his blog about the experience.

New Westminster Coun. Daniel Fontaine, who plans to table a motion calling for a formal report from the mayor on the trip, said he was unsatisfied with Jonstone’s answers.

“The mayor keeps talking about his private blog and how he’s been the most open about his whole trip,”  he said.

“The mayor is the first person to say to council and privately that these types of blogs or podcasts are not civic government official material, they are not a report to council, they do not have the same scrutiny,” he said.

Fontaine said his concerns have nothing to do with debating climate change, but rather focus on whether policies and procedures were followed on Jonstone’s trip.

Video: New Westminster councillors question mayor’s Dubai trip

He said other Canadian municipal leaders brought a report to council for debate before accepting funding to go on the trip, which would have allayed concerns if the same process had been followed in New Westminster.

He said he wants clarity on the details of the trip, including its cost, which other cities have estimated to be in the $30,000 range.

“At the end of the day I could not care less where the mayor went on this trip, this is about the process by which he received funding to go on this trip, why council wasn’t apprised of it, and the whole procedures and policies around this really concern me,” he said.

Council is slated to receive a staff report about the trip Monday.