Ottawa Business Journal: Peter Kovessy

The first Rideau Canal Festival is scheduled for this August, incorporating the Rideau Canal Flotilla and Colonel By Day festivities. But veteran Ottawa festival organizer Michel Gauthier is poised to pioneer another first in the nation’s capital, when he hosts what’s believed to become Ottawa’s first carbon-neutral festival.

Working with a Toronto non-profit, Gauthier explained the festival will calculate all carbon generated from the event and purchase offset credits to fund the reforestation of an indigenous forest in Vancouver. Despite the additional cost, Mr. Gauthier and the Rideau Canal Festival’s director of business development, Fred Casarramona, explain that going carbon-neutral makes good business sense.

OBJ: Where did the idea of a carbon-neutral festival come from?

GAUTHIER: We have a lot of festivals that have gone to the green festival approach, in terms of recycling, reusing, reducing. But I wanted to go further. I wanted to see what kind of leadership could be offered by this new festival and to push the envelope a bit. The other reality that really motivated me is that, if we are celebrating a UNESCO world heritage site, the whole concept of the UNESCO site is that we want to protect these sites for future generations. We’re talking about safeguarding an environment. I’m thinking, if we are going to celebrate this, we need to be as green as possible. We need to be aligned with the whole concept of UNESCO.

We are a tourism product, so we have people coming from all over to our city to take part. And those people travelling are putting out gas emissions and we are putting out carbon dioxide when we plan and execute the festival. My thinking was, “How do we neutralize that?”

So looking for a model, I realized there were no models out there. Then I shopped around, I met with corporations that are in the offsetting part of environment and I came across Zerofootprint, a non-profit out of Toronto. What they do is they design calculators to help corporations or individuals to figure out how much carbon dioxide we are putting out there.

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