On the evening of November 5, as Donald Trump was sweeping up electoral colleges in the US of A, a more significant democratic ritual was underway: the swearing-in of Halifax’s new councillors. The free event at the Central Library started with a short concert consisting of three songs. One song from the local group Drummers From Home, the Mi’kmaq honour song and, of course, our national anthem.
The event was a well-attended affair that also featured a video extolling the virtues of public service, in which the narrator explains that public service is like a road—it divides communities and makes it dangerous for children to play outside. Just kidding. The video says public service is like a road because at first it seems like a good idea, but in the end, it just creates a massive liability for governments. Just kidding again. The video actually says public service is like a road weaving through our communities, enriching the lives of the people who live there. However, municipal budget documents suggest that the city should change this metaphor in their promo video, as according to the city’s books, roads are much better at bankrupting the city than enriching it.
The swearing-in itself was painfully dry, as 16 councillors and a new mayor took the oath of office. And even though the ceremony was technically the first official meeting of our new council, they slacked off and didn’t do any council work. The excitement of debates and votes and staff reports will have to wait until this new council’s second council meeting, happening on November 12. For now, all we have are questions about this group of people. Did we do okay? Or did we vote for a crop of councillors who aren’t up for the challenges facing the city today and into the future? Sure, it doesn’t feel inspiring that Donald Trump won on promises to become an existential threat to American democracy, but this new council is far more important to day-to-day life in Halifax. And the truth is at this point we just don’t know much about how it will work. Anyone who tries to tells you definitively right now is only making a guess. Some guesses are more informed than others, yet they are guesses nonetheless. That said…
The definitive answer to how our new council will do
We asked our readers what issues they wanted some definitive answers/guesses to, in terms of what our new council will do, so without further ado, let’s dig into it.
Climate change
Our new council is likely to underperform on climate change. This is not because of things like new councillor John A. Young telling The Coast before the election that he didn’t think climate change is an emergency, which it is, but because the root causes of climate change are ridiculously complex and also happen to be very popular with voters. Take for example our transportation, which accounts for about one third of our emissions. In a perfect world, if you didn’t want to kill the climate while moving around the city, you would not drive a car. But we do not have a perfect world, we have a suburban one. In practice, this means most people will choose the deadlier, frustrating, planet-destroying transportation option of driving for most of their trips. We do this not because we want to spend $1300 a month to die a violent death in an intersection, get irate in congestion and ensure our children have no habitable planet in the future; it’s just that we don’t have good alternatives.
On top of lacking alternatives to driving, our municipality has policies on the books that encourage driving and third-party driving on our behalf, with policies that allow for suburban drive-thrus and car-based delivery apps that don’t charge a congestion fee. Both of these policies could be changed by council, but they probably won’t be. Sure, making these changes would get the city closer to achieving the goals laid out in municipal strategies, plus be a boon for the city’s budget and a net positive for the city in the long term. Even so, people would be mildly inconvenienced in the short term, which makes changing for the better unpopular, and everyone on council needs to win a popularity contest for their power. As a result it is extremely likely that this crop of politicians, who all (except for one) told The Coast that climate change is an emergency, will, in reality, vote like their winning re-election is the only actual emergency.
Transportation
During the election campaign, some of the candidates had policies that were absolute clangers. Take, for example, our new mayor Andy Fillmore’s platform (pdf below), which said that to relieve congestion, he’d ensure road work was done at night and potholes were filled. This plan to reduce congestion was listed under the platform’s transit section, coming right after Fillmore’s promise to “implement bus rapid transit (BRT) solutions to get people moving again.” Implementing the Bus Rapid Transit plan would do a hell of a lot more to reduce congestion than doing road maintenance at night and filling potholes, yet according to the platform, implementing the BRT is not a congestion reduction plan.
Nevertheless, except for councillor Trish Purdy, who loves congestion and previously told The Coast that she didn’t think the Integrated Mobility Plan was a good idea, everyone else has stated that improving transit or active transportation, or both, was high on their list of priorities should they get elected. Our new council will likely perform well on this file, but the jury’s out as to whether or not they’ll take the bold steps required to follow through and be successful with their promises. At this point, the easiest way to improve transit is to give buses dedicated road space so they aren’t stuck in congestion. The easiest way to improve active transit is to give bike riders dedicated and protected space so parents feel comfortable letting their children ride bikes to school. Will our councillors be so bold?
Our new council itself
Rest easy, Haligonians, for we did not fuck up our election as badly as the United States did theirs. While it remains unlikely that our councillors will be the leaders we need them to be amid this climate emergency, it is also unlikely that they will make things worse. Even though some of the re-elected incumbents haven’t made the best decisions in the past and are likely to continue making less-than-ideal decisions in the future (lookin’ at you, Districts 2, 3 and 4), the new council as a whole is shaping up to be a relatively strong legislative body. Returning councillors Cathy Deagle Gammon, Kathryn Morse and Patty Cuttell are no longer rookies, and except for a few absolute clangers by Cuttell in the last term, all three have been fairly strong in their arguments and votes. (If there were such a thing as a Rookie Councillor of the Term award, Morse would have won it.)
Of council’s other veterans, Sam Austin and Shawn Cleary have been consistently good, progressive legislators with strong vote records demonstrating they are willing and able to make bold policy choices. Cleary, for example, has voted against the RCMP budget and will likely be why large trucks and SUVs pay more for parking in the future when his motion from last term comes back to this council. Although not quite as progressive as the other two, Tony Mancini spent the last council term trying to fix some deep-rooted systemic inequities like the city means testing affordable rec programs.
A quick glance at the CVs of our new class of rookies suggests that council has added a lot of depth to our policy roster, with a few buts. For example, Janet Steele was strong enough to beat out both former councillor Richard Zirawski and incumbent Iona Stoddard, and she has an excellent CV, but in her responses to The Coast’s survey, she said that she was worried apartment buildings would change the character of neighbourhoods. Although change is anxiety-provoking, the whole point of apartments is to change the character of our neighbourhoods—and that’s what we want. In practical terms, changing from suburban communities to the city’s desired complete communities means we must add multi-unit buildings and mixed-use zoning throughout neighbourhoods that are currently exclusively for single-family homes. We need them if we want our city to be fiscally sustainable.
In spite of Steele’s documented trepidation, she does not seem to be an idiot. The real question is not: Are our new councillors worried about change? The question instead is, will worries about change prevent them from making the hard decisions needed for our long term survival?
And the early read of our new council—my informed guess—is that a majority of them, the majority of the time, will make the right decision. There are genuine reasons for optimism about the future of the city of Halifax. But in politics, like in sports, it’s the hope that gets ya.
This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 6, 2024.
Refreshing writing Matt Stickland.