One Small Victory For Ottawa City Hall

Published 05/18/2025 · Updated 05/18/2025

With the potential of another postal strike in May and Round 2 of city taxes due mid-June city hall has noted that, postal strike or not, our municipal taxes must be paid on time.

The city has also reminded us that we can switch to paperless billing because it’s “environmentally friendly and reduces paper waste thereby supporting a more sustainable future. To enroll in paperless billing, simply log in to your My ServiceOttawa account …” But is paperless billing really as environmentally friendly as advertised?

There is a popular misconception that paperless billing is an important step towards saving the planet. In fact, viewing and paying bills online probably does more damage to good old mother earth than receiving paper bills in the mail.

Paper is a renewable resource. Once a forest has been harvested to manufacture pulp and paper it can be replanted although there is some degradation to the land where the woodland previously stood. In addition, almost all of the products manufactured in the pulp-and-paper industry can be recycled.

On the other hand, access to paperless billing requires, in most cases, laptop computers, tablets, or cellphones, all of which are made from ores and minerals mined from the earth as well as critical minerals, primarily lithium and cobalt, which are used to build rechargeable batteries that serve as a power source. Most of these raw materials are found on the ground or underground. While many of these materials can be recycled, none of them are renewable.

Think Practicality? Think City Of Ottawa

So why the big push for paperless billing? When we were all younger, companies billed their customers for the products or services they provided via monthly invoice that was mailed to each customer along with a return envelope. The cost to the corporation was two envelopes, a piece of paper showing the amount due, printer ink, plus the cost of postage to get all this information to the customer’s mailbox.

Around 15 to 20 years ago some insightful accountant saw a way to save their corporation money by urging its customers to go paperless and “Save a Tree”. Was shaming customers into saving a tree the goal of the company or was reducing corporate expenses to increase profits the real motivation? I wonder how a corporation urging us to save a tree would answer the following question “Is saving a tree more environmentally friendly than atomizing a mountain?”

Environmental debate aside, there is a happy ending to the issue of a potential postal strike and payment of our next tax bill. This past Thursday I unexpectedly received my second tax bill in the mail so I won’t have sign onto my mountain-atomizing laptop to find out how much I owe the city (instead I can decimate that mountain performing some other frivolous task such as checking sports scores).

The big win for me and I assume all other readers is that someone at city hall figured out how to get our bills to us in time so we can avoid a lot of fussing, and that was to simply mail the bill earlier than originally planned. It was a pretty simple solution but when it comes to Ottawa City Hall, we should celebrate any victory, no matter how small. Now maybe someone at 110 Laurier Avenue West can try a different approach to some of the bigger issues that need to be addressed.

Howard Crerar is a project manager and has worked in the software industry for three decades.